


signifying nothing

by kwritten



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Depression, Female Friendship, Female Protagonist, Female Relationships, Female-Centric, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Muslim Character, POV Female Character, Season/Series 06, Sister-Sister Relationship, Writing, perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4081759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>season six character-study; after her sister's death and resurrection, Dawn grapples with her own humanity and tenuous grasp on reality; as her depression swings her from reckless to numb, she reaches out to new friends for help and a new perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	signifying nothing

_Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player_  
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage  
And then is heard no more: it is a tale  
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,  
**Signifying nothing**. 

She wore _her favorite sweater_ when she made her first birthday cake, or maybe it wasn't the first time she made a birthday cake, memories of sitting on a kitchen counter stirring batter or licking frosting off a spoon while perched a stool ran through her mind, but she pushed these memories aside and focused on the concrete details in front of her: the box of chocolate cake mix she bought at the Dollar Store after school, the boxes of _Hot Tamales_ , the dark chocolate chips, the plastic container of strawberry icing, the mixing bowl, and the electric beater. Maybe she's made a birthday cake before, but never her own. 

She's fifteen years old. 

She rolled up the sleeves of _her favorite sweater_ and examined the back of the box carefully. **STEP ONE** , it says, **PREHEAT OVEN TO 360ºF**. She walked to the stove and opened the door - last time she tried to make a frozen pizza, Willow had left garlic bread in there the night before, they'd had to spend two cramped days at Xander's apartment waiting for the smoke to air out. It was empty. She carefully turned to the dial to 360º.

She imagined the back door opening and someone coming in, seeing the supplies on the counter, biting back shock, and surprising her with a _"hell no we didn't forget"_ and then a big group dinner with everyone at that Italian place where you can draw on the tablecloth and tiramisu for dessert. 

When she turned back the kitchen was still empty and she pretended not to feel an ache in her chest. She couldn't tell yet if it was the sadness over being forgotten or bitterness that even that tiny daydream where they all forgot and she magnanimously pretending they didn't was now a spectacular fantasy. 

**STEP TWO: EMPTY PACKET INTO LARGE MIXING BOWL. ADD EGGS, OIL, AND WATER.** She looked at the picture on the box that showed two eggs and a cup and a quarter water. She walked the three steps to the fridge and opened the door. She pulled out a carton of eggs and a bottle of strawberry flavored milk. The egg carton was empty. She threw it in the recycle bin on the porch next to the back door and then went to the dining room where Willow had left her laptop. She opened a browser and typed in, "EGGS SUBSTITUTE." 

In the kitchen she found two overripe bananas and just enough olive oil for the instructions on the box. She hoped there wasn't too much of a difference between vegetable oil and olive oil. 

As she mashed up the bananas into the brown powder, oil, and strawberry milk, she imagined someone coming home with groceries in their arms. She imagined laughing about baking a cake with bananas instead of eggs. She imagined them helping her bake the cake and eat it. As she carefully sped up the electric beater to the mix the batter, she imagined them hating her cake, but eating it anyway and only realizing it was her birthday several days later. 

She walked to the front door, opened it and looked out. She could hear children screaming and laughing but couldn't see them. The sun would set in a couple of hours; she could run clear across town before then. She could run right past the " **WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE** " sign and straight into the desert. She could get lost before the sun set and curl up in the hot sand and wait for the temperatures to drop until she shivered. She could run all the way to a lonely death. 

She shut the door and wiped a speck of batter that had flung itself on _her favorite sweater_ and walked back to the kitchen.

She emptied a box of _Hot Tamales_ into a contraption she was pretty sure was for dicing garlic and mashed the candies into pieces roughly the size of her pinkie nail. She poured the chunks of red candies and half the bag of dark chocolate chips into the batter and stirred them in with a rubber spatula. 

The oven chimed.

 **STEP THREE: GREASE PAN WITH BUTTER OR OIL AND PLACE INTO OVEN. BAKE FOR THE TIME ALLOTTED TO YOUR PAN.** She pulled out two 8-inch round cake tins and sprayed them thoroughly with the sticky can of **PAM** from next to the stove. She poured the batter into each pan equally and set them side-by-side in the oven.

She set the timer on the stovetop.

She set a timer on her watch. 

She set an egg time and carried it with her to the living room. 

She pulled _16 Candles, 13 Going On 30,_ and _Liar, Liar_ out of the cupboard and examined them carefully. Sticky sweet birthdays, where everything is terrible right up to the moment when everything was right. 

She felt a laugh bubbling up inside her - she saw a low chuckle turn into a high giggle and then before she could stop it, there’d she be, sitting on the floor of the living room crying hysterical, deep sobs until all three timers started going off around her. 

She glared at her reflection in the TV to stop the laugh in its tracks. Not today, she was not going to fall into hysterics all alone. It wouldn’t summon anyone to her rescue, she knew that now after many failed attempts that had left her wrung-out and nursing a headache for the next day or two. Even her imagination - as wild and fanciful as it was - couldn’t conjure up a white knight to her side today. Someone older, someone wiser, someone with more years on their side maybe could have told her gently that after all, it was her imagination that left her alone on the floor in tears - not any other actual human. 

But she _was_ alone. 

She put in the old, worn VHS copy of Lugosi’s _Nosferatu_ in the old, dusty VCR and curled up on the couch with a pillow clutched to her chest. She focused on every minute, grainy detail on the screen and didn’t let herself think of the million and a half times she’d watched this movie before - with two warm bodies on either side of her giggling and passing popcorn back and forth and doing silly voice-overs or complaining about the lack of vampire authenticity. 

A single tear rolled down her cheek. 

She stood up quickly, shaking her head, and stopped the tape. She pulled a DVD out at random from the pile of must-sees based on old literary texts Spike had - presumably - stolen and then left at the house in anticipation of forcing them upon her during the next long night of Dawn-duty he was allotted. It said a little too much about her life that watching Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer running about in period costumes was further from her own life than a horror film made in the 1920’s … or any horror film, really. There was too much realism in ghosts and goblins, the only real escape was in tea parties and unrequited love. 

Thirty-two minutes into the film her timers began to buzz, echoing through the house. She pressed pause, wrapped _her favorite sweater_ tighter around her, and walked steadily to the kitchen, taking care to roll every footstep from heel to ball to toe, the hardwood floors cool and comforting on her bare feet. 

**STEP FOUR: TAKE PAN OUT OF OVEN. COOL. SPREAD ICING EVENLY AND SERVE.** She turned off the timer on the stovetop and plucked a toothpick out of the small ceramic vase on the counter and stuck it into the center of one cake - clean - and then the other - clean again. She carefully lowered the oven lid completely, pulled oven mitts over both hands - the memory of trying to pull frozen mozzarella sticks out of the oven with one hand only to spill the lot everywhere fresh in her mind - and slowly pulled the cakes out one at a time, setting them on the cooling racks she’d set out on the stovetop earlier. The fan above the stove let out a pleasant hum when she turned it on and then began the task of the icing.

First, she poured the second box of _Hot Tamales_ into the garlic dicer and chopped them into as small of pieces as she could without accidentally squishing them together and turning the gummies into a large, solid mass. It was a delicate balance. She should have put them in the freezer for a while to keep them from being too gooey. Then, she scooped the strawberry icing into a bowl and dumped the ground up _Tamales_ on top. In the freezer was a half a bag of sliced strawberries left over from an ill-advised smoothie phase. She squeezed the bag a few times to break up any slices that had frozen together over time and then dumped them in the bowl, too. After stirring everything together she dipped her finger in the mixture and brought it to her mouth and grimaced. She turned to the fridge and pulled out the small bottle of lemon juice her mother had kept there for cooking. She had always loved it because it looked like a real lemon - aside from the flat bottom that kept it from rolling around in the fridge and the green lid. She squeezed it viciously over the icing, liberally downing the mixture with the remaining sour fluid inside, and then throwing the empty container in the plastic trash can next to the back door. She nearly missed. She usually missed. She stirred her icing and taste-tested it again. 

Perfect. 

She pressed her hands to the top of the cakes - they were still a little warm, but probably wouldn’t fall apart if she started icing them now. She brought down a large glass plate they always used for cakes and took a butter knife out of a drawer. The bottom edge of _her favorite sweater_ got caught in the drawer momentarily and she scolded it in her mind for getting in the way. She slid her knife around the edge of the cake tin, jarring loose the edges, and then flipped the tin over onto the plate, shaking the cake free and putting the tin in the sink behind her. 

She spread a third of the frosting over the top and sides of the cake and then pursed her lips. 

In the cupboard next to the fridge there was a can of sliced peaches, two cans of chicken noodle soup, two cans of fruit cocktail, and a can of black olives. She plucked up the can of peaches, opening it and draining the juice out over the sink and then - in one practiced motion - pulled the thick plastic cutting board out of the cupboard in the kitchen island and poured the thick slices of peach onto it. With a small knife, she sliced the peaches as thin as she could, layering them on top of the cake, from time to time eating a slice. When that was finished, she plopped the other half of the cake on top and carefully frosted every exposed inch, licking the rubber spatula clean afterwards. 

When the cake was finished, she cleaned the entire kitchen. Washing all the utensils and bowls and pans, drying them, and placing them back into their respective places. She cleaned off all the counters with a soapy rag and swept the floor. She even took the kitchen garbage out to the trashcan on the street and emptied the recycle bin as well. 

As she put a new liner in the kitchen trash, she thought she heard the front door open and close. She forced herself to breathe evenly through her nose, to finish her task. She thought she heard a light footstep on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. Walking carefully through the dining room into the foyer she cocked her head and listened, waiting at the foot of the stairs. 

Nervously, she tugged at the sleeves of _her favorite sweater_ , holding the edges of each sleeve to her palms with her fingers, the slight bump of the seam pressing comfortingly in the exact center of her palm. 

She waited, the ticking of the hall clock keeping better time than her erratic heart. Minutes passed, slowly, her arms tight to her sides and her heart full of either dread or hope. No sound came from above, not even a whisper or a small creak. “Hello?” she called up, hand reaching for the bannister. She winced at the desperation in her voice. 

In the living room, the DVD player clicked from pause over to the main menu, the light strains of music now filtering through the empty house. On the third repeat of the menu she mentally kicked herself and willed her feet to carry her back to the kitchen. On the fifth repeat, one foot raised itself up onto the first step and her voice shouted up - as loudly as it could, “HELLO?” In her voice was the telltale annoyance of a fifteen year old girl and at this, she also winced. 

Dawn the annoying, the clumsy, the desperate younger sister. Dawn the forgotten yelling angrily at an empty house. Dawn, too young to be anything but a burden, too old to need basic care. Dawn, standing at the foot of the stairs in _her favorite sweater_ , shouting at the air like it could hear her. 

She stomped into the kitchen and glared moodily at her pink cake. In the drawer with the kabob-sticks, barbeque lighter, chopsticks, corn-on-the-cob skewers, and fondue forks she found a half-empty box of birthday cake candles. She grabbed the lighter and one candle and shut the door with a bump of her hip. 

She placed the pink and white spiraled candle in the center of the cake and lit it with the long barbeque lighter.

“Happy one-year of being a real girl,’ she whispered to herself and then closed her eyes and blew. 

Last year her mother and sister had bought the trick candles that bounce back into life again and again, she had huffed with frustration as they laughed and teased her; finally the three of them all blew the fourteen flickering flames at the same time. They ate the whole cake together standing up in the kitchen. Her mother had found a recipe for a Mexican-chili-chocolate cake with raspberry ganache. It was tart and sweet and spicy and perfect and after some initial misgivings, they seemed to enjoy it almost as much as she did. Them with large mugs of cold milk and her with ice and orange juice. Afterwards, they had collapsed into a large heap on the couch and had a horror-film marathon, laughing and wincing at the bad special effects and cheering on the Final Girl with glee. 

She shook her head to shelve the memory and opened her eyes. The candle wick was black and smoking. 

Even real memories made her cry these days. The fake ones always an assault to her senses - so vivid and tangible and impossible. 

She pulled down a small plate from the high cupboard over her head and took a knife and fork from the drawer and then turned to the cake its lone candle still smoking slightly. She pursed her lips and then put the plate back in the cupboard and knife back in the drawer. She filled a large glass with crushed ice and poured orange juice into it. With the glass and fork in one hand and the cake balanced in the other, she made her way to the living room. 

On the afternoon that she turned fifteen, Dawn Summers sat on the floor of the living room – back against the sofa and legs beneath the coffee table – and ate an entire spicy-chocolate-strawberry cake and watched films about women in silk and satin gloves with too much to give and too much desire in a time when women were allowed so little of their own heart to show and there were no monsters or ghosts and the villains were pitiable and beautiful.

And no one came home to interrupt her or to stop her or question her. No one came through the door and walked by unseeing and unhearing. 

Sometime after sunset, Dawn took her platter and her fork and her empty glass and washed them in the kitchen. The water was too hot, it scalded her fingers and turned her arms bright red. It almost made her laugh, this pretense of fragility that her skin and cells were still putting on. 

She took an old, worn, clean towel out of the drawer and wiped the cake platter down carefully before placing it back in the high cupboard. She could reach it comfortably rising up on the balls of her feet. There was a small stepladder next to the door for her sister to reach the taller cupboards. She grimaced as she closed the doors and lowered herself back to the ground. 

When had she outgrown her sister? Was it recent? Was it harder for everyone to see how much she needed her big sister because she was such an oversized giant? Or maybe her sister was an undersized shrimp.

Dawn wrapped _her favorite sweater_ tighter around her and turned to leave just as the back door opened and Buffy slunk in, drenched from head to foot. 

“Holy crap. Buffy—” Dawn looked out the window and frowned, “I didn’t hear it rain today.”

Buffy’s glazed eyes followed Dawn’s glance toward the window, a beat too late, just like everything about the Slayer these days. Her forehead wrinkled slightly, “It rained today? I didn’t notice.”

Dawn edged around the kitchen island towards her sister, slowing her speech down, “Buffy? Why are you all wet?

Buffy looked down and herself and frowned, “Sewer vamps.”

“Maybe you should go take a warm bath?”

Buffy nodded slowly, “A bath sounds nice.”

“Do you… should I run it for you?”

Buffy stiffened, “I’m tired, not an invalid.”

“Well leave your clothes in the hall so I can wash the stench right away.”

She shrugged as if to say _whatever_ and started towards the stairs. Her gaze flickered over Dawn, “That’s a cute sweater.”

Dawn tugged at the sleeves, “Yeah, I kinda hate it,”

But Buffy was already gone. Dawn stared at the empty kitchen, listening to the soft sounds of a body going about the motions of living upstairs. 

“It always looked better on you,” she whispered. 

As if she could somehow be overheard. As if there was anyone around to listen.

She cried sitting on top of the washing machine, the rocking sounds drowning out her nearly invisible gasps, while upstairs her sister took a long bath and then put herself to bed. 

She cried sitting on top of the washing machine, not because she felt a little sick after eating that entire cake, but because she was fifteen and she didn’t know how to bring her sister back to life. 

 

Sometimes, she dreamed that she was weightless, floating in a void. In the dream, she didn’t have to reach to touch the sky with her fingertips, she was the sky. In the dream, she didn’t have to shift her weight to feel the ground beneath her feet, she was the very earth and soil. 

Sometimes, she dreamed that the world was green and she was green and everything was green. And everything was green because she was green and she was everything.

Sometimes, she woke and felt homesick for something she didn’t remember.

 

The day of the funeral – secret and private as it was – she got in a fight with Willow about that damn sweater. She had found it slung carelessly over the railing at the foot of Buffy’s bed – as though it was laid out to be worn and then forgotten, as though it had just been taken off – when she went in to pick out an outfit for her sister to be buried in. She picked the sweater up off the bed and slid her arms into it. 

It was a little too short, especially in the arms. When she pulled at the sleeves, so that they’d cover her wrists, the shoulders tightened. 

It was red… well more like what stores called _blood orange_ these days, but Dawn remembered when it had been a violent shade of crimson. It had once had light violet cloth flowers sewn to the collar, but they had worn and been ripped away over time. There was a loose thread on one shoulder that Dawn would play with when they leaned against each other on the couch watching movies. For the first couple of days, it still almost smelled like Buffy. 

It wore away over time; and as poignant and beautiful Dawn had always found this truth in novels and poetry, she discovered the reality of it hurt without being beautiful and happened all at once, instead of as a slow decline. 

Willow found Dawn’s obsession over the old sweater irritating and disgusting. The first two weeks after… the Summers’ house rang out with shouts and curses. They threw a few non-breakable things at each other. The day of the funeral was just the first. Everyone wore black except Dawn - who wore her sweater proudly, despite Willow’s unending glare and Tara’s pleading eyes asking _please make this easier for her, she’s hurting_. But this only made Dawn more stubborn, more angry. 

When Willow cried, she had Tara’s hand to latch onto. When Xander cried, he had Anya’s arms to hide in. When Giles and Spike cried, they could at least crawl into a bottle.

What did she have?

An old, forgotten sweater, that’s what she had. 

The funeral was held on a bright afternoon, they put her headstone where it would never feel shade. Dawn felt this was all very hypocritical, but after driving Tara to tears that morning while shouting at Willow, she decided not to push it. She hid her laughter and displeasure. She wore a black skirt and heels and pulled her hair back into a respectful twist at her nape and she watched them bury her sister.

That night, she snuck out of the house and came back to the grave under the moonlight in jeans and sneakers with her long hair hanging loose down her back, a couple Cokes in one hand and a pizza in the other – half anchovies, half Hawaiian. 

She sat down against the headstone and patted it affectionately, “Betcha didn’t recognize me earlier, huh? That stupid skirt was… well anyway I had to come back as myself.” She sat a slice of Hawaiian on the headstone and opened the Diet Coke to put it beside the pizza, “Your favorite.”

As she ate, Dawn told the silent rock at her back everything that had happened in the past few days. “They really miss you,” she said quietly after about an hour. She picked up a cigarette butt off the ground and set it next to the pizza and diet Coke. “Stop lurking, Spike. It’s creepy.”

He was wearing a bright blue shirt under his duster and Dawn smiled, it had felt so wrong to bury her sister in daylight surrounded by black-clad mourners, this vibrant splash of color under the moonlight almost felt right. Almost. 

She held up the pizza and a thermos of blood laced with Tabasco sauce. 

“Did you know I’d be here or is this bait?” he said with a swig of the thermos. 

“I know you knew her,” which was all the right things to say and everything about it was wrong. 

“They did, too.” He smirked when she grabbed the cigarette out of his mouth and didn’t cough after a long drag.

“They did it backwards,” she thought of the way the sunlight had glinted in Willow’s red hair that afternoon, how it should have been moonlight or… how something had felt too bright and _hard_ about the way they buried her sister in the ground. Even if the moonlight felt too cold on her skin now. Maybe there was no proper time of day to define someone like that. “It was all just a show to make _them_ feel better.”

“And this isn’t just for you to feel better?” he waved at her picnic.

Dawn was silent, sucking on the cigarette until Spike snatched it away. 

“You know she wrote her college entrance essay on the back of a gravestone wearing a pink halter? She used the names on the graves to help her memorize SAT words. She spent… she _lived_ her life surrounded by the dead under the stars she—” Dawn hiccupped and took several deep breaths before continuing. “She should have been put … today was all wrong.”

He didn’t say _Everything is all wrong_ and maybe that was for the best, but she still maybe needed him to. 

She didn’t cry and Spike didn’t move to comfort her. They sat for a while – a riot of color in the dim reflection of midnight. 

“She was more than just her job.”

Dawn narrowed her eyes, “ _ **I know that**_.” 

“Maybe…” he shrugged. “Maybe today was their way of reminding _her_ that?”

Dawn fell back against the stone, “They keep talking about her like…” she shook her head. “I dunno… like it was all so easy for her. Like she never stumbled or doubted. I may not be _real_ , but I know that’s not true. She wasn’t perfect all the time.” Somewhere, a car siren went off. It was probably a few blocks away, the distant strain of it carrying into the stillness a desperate reminder that life was continuing on down those suburban streets. “That’s just how humans respond to death, I know,” the tears were starting to fall and this time she didn’t stop them. “But it feels disrespectful.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and tugged them to her chest, “Like she wasn’t tired, like she wasn’t ready, like she doesn’t deserve to rest.”

His eyes flashed gold, “You think she _wanted_ to die?”

She looked at the stars, avoiding his gaze, “I just want her to be happy.”

She fell asleep there, her hand curled up in the grass, clutching at it as if it were a hand. He carried her home and even took her shoes off before tucking her into bed. 

He’s old-fashioned like that. 

 

The next night, she railed. She may or may not have snuck out the bottle of brandy her mother kept hidden in a cupboard either for baking or for late-night talks with Giles. The result was a rant that left her knees bloody from banging against the gravestone. 

She was sitting on the ground, grabbing up chunks of grass and dirt to throw at her sister’s name, screaming obscenities and sobbing when Spike materialized out of the darkness. 

Spike picked up the nearly-empty bottle of brandy and poured the rest in the grass near Buffy’s headstone, whispering something Dawn couldn’t hear. 

“Shouldn’t get in the habit of drinking alone.”

“So I should drink with the dead?”

He sat down next to her, bumping shoulders and lit a cigarette, “What else do you have?”

She took a drag and then put the cigarette back in the loose, white hand that hung over his knee. She didn’t laugh or apologize or yell or cry. She was just grateful to be in the presence of someone who didn’t expect something from her and so she did nothing. 

Like a wind-up doll. 

(Well, isn’t that what she was?)

 

The next day or five days later or fifteen days later (he was the only one who kept count) she asked him, “Don’t you ever get mad?” Her head was resting on _her favorite sweater_ , folded up like a pillow, her back against the cool grass and her knees bent so that her feet were pressed into the ground. He was standing somewhere further away, the only thing in her range of vision the small cloud that signified his relative proximity. 

“Every damn day.” A stream of smoke clouded her vision of the stars. “Sometimes twice.”

“No I mean,” Dawn blinked back tears, “at _her_. Mad _at_ her?”

His head appeared on the ground beside her, cigarette hanging between his lips. “Sometimes three times a day.”

“For dying?” she wished she knew constellations, wished there was some way to look up and have names, names, names and stories twirling through her head, something to distract her. She angled her body over, resting her head on his bony shoulder, “Teach me about the stars. Classically trained gentlemen like you must have learned the stars, right?”

He chuckled and stuck the cigarette in her mouth with a smile she felt rather than heard, “Yeah… so there was this bloke…”

 _For not living enough_ , was what she imagined he was going to say. 

And because that made sense to her, she let it be true. 

 

 

That summer she taught herself how to choose what was real. Nights sitting against the smooth stone she talked to more honestly and openly than she ever did her sister, a book in her lap, the map of constellations she and Spike made together at her side, wearing _her favorite sweater_ , that was real. It became the most important thing, her oasis in a world that felt too bright, too warm, too stifling, too empty. 

The fighting with Willow tapered off after a while. They were both too tired, too absorbed in their own grief. When Dawn learned that all that time they had been pulling Buffy out of her grave, she nearly laughed. Arguing with Dawn took away too much energy from the rescue mission. 

Why deal with the broken girl on the side of the road when you’re on your way to rescue a princess from a tower? Heroes, did they think only of the crowd, the princess with her jewels and pretty smiles? 

Well, Buffy had never really seemed to behave that way, but she was a real Hero. Helping the helpless. She was the hero _and_ the princess.

Dawn didn’t know what that made _her_ exactly – but she definitely wasn’t a damsel-in-distress. She had met those before, at the Bronze or in the street, a stream of their own blood running down their necks, water-proof mascara falling down their faces in complete disregard of their function, breathless voices and grasping hands calling out for the Slayer, for their savior.

God, she was so _not_ a damsel. 

She stood on a tower and watched her blood give forth a whole new world and maybe that makes her a villain or a weapon or a MacGuffin. 

Maybe it was easy to forget her in the after-math of death the way Lancelot stopped seeking the Grail. 

Standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in her hands to stop them from shaking and looking into Willow’s shining eyes she wondered which one of them was the Morgaine and which was the Guinevere. One of them will bring about the downfall of a nation – time might give them both the chance. How many ashen, smoky battlegrounds will Buffy stand in with a sword in her hand? How much destruction will be caused by her own blood?

 

“You’re mixing up your metaphors.”

Her head was resting against a gravestone of a girl fully alive and presumably resting in her bed a few blocks away, _The Once and Future King_ on her knees. She narrowed her eyes at him, “I suppose you want to be Gwen.”

“Hell, I’ll be Gawain just as long as I get a seat at the table.”

She snorted, “Were you ever the noble, innocent one?”

He laughed and smoke filled the sky, “No, but I was a terrible ponce once.” 

“Once?”

For fourteen days she slept in a graveyard, a dozen different Arthurian tales littering her dreams. Tara raised her eyebrows at the growing stack on her desk. Anya gave a very detailed first-hand account of Gwen’s wardrobe – but doesn’t take credit for the whole fiasco as it turns out. 

“You mean _Morgaine_ turned down being a vengeance demon?” Spike sometimes is an adorable old man. 

“She’s still around. Throws a killer Samhain. Don’t look at me like that. Ladies only. I couldn’t get you an invite even if she wasn’t mad at me about that David Bowie thing that happened a while back.”

(For the next six months, Dawn and Spike kicked around theories about _what_ the Bowie-incident actually was. Dawn’s money was on it being related to the _Labyrinth_ somehow.)

 

Fifteen days after her dead sister started walking around again, Tara showed up at the gravestone around two in the morning. 

“Did Spike tell you I was here?” Dawn scowled and kicked over a Diet Coke can as Tara settled down next to her. 

“I knew the whole time. No one had to tell me.”

“Oh.”

Tara took the  OREO Dawn offered her and ate it quietly. 

“Aren’t you going to convince me to go home?”

Tara tilted her head back and smiled softly, “My mom went through chemo three times. The cancer just kept coming back again and again. She… my father said it was because of the magic, but I think now she always knew the magic needed to _breathe_ \- she kept it locked inside until her body started to eat at itself to stop the pain.” Dawn brushed the crumbs off her jeans and took Tara’s hand in hers, squeezing softly. “I spent so much time in the hospital, worrying. The first time we brought her home everyone was so… _happy_. She ‘beat’ it, she was better. I was eight. I couldn’t sleep for about a week, just lying in bed worried.”

“Is this the part where you tell me to stop worrying and just appreciate the time I have with her because it is a gift?”

Tara didn’t acknowledge Dawn’s sarcasm, “One night, my mom came in with a boombox and a tape she had gotten from a nurse in her ward, of a hospital heart monitor beeping, machines humming. I slept normally for the first time. Like the silence meant she was really gone and then when she was…” Tara’s voice caught on a sob that she pushed down with a self-deprecating chuckle.

They sat in silence, Dawn dozing against Tara’s shoulder, until the sun started to rise in the distance.

While Dawn showered, Tara started making pancakes. They ate them standing up side-by-side at the stovetop, trying to make funny shapes and giggling at the results. When she dropped Dawn off at school, Tara said, “I thought about making you a charm – it’ll glow if a demon gets too close but if Spike is—”

“Make it.”

“—too close all the time it might not … okay.”

“Something gaudy and old-fashioned and ridiculous.”

“Obviously.”

Three days later an ornate ring with a Celtic knot appeared on Dawn’s pillow. It matched the charm on Tara’s necklace, a fact that no one else seemed to notice. Light-green warmth would infuse it when a non-threatening demon or vamp was near. It went ice-cold blue if something malicious was afoot. 

About three weeks after rising from her grave, Dawn nearly ran into Buffy on patrol while heading to the gravestone.

She stood in the shadows of a house across the street from the cemetery, tugging on the sleeves of _her favorite sweater_ , and watched her sister’s blonde hair prowl through the landscape stalking a couple of fresh vamps. The fight went on a little too long – like a cat playing with a mouse before biting its head off with a satisfied smirk. There was a recklessness about the way she threw her body into each punch and heavy land that reminded her very vaguely of Faith. 

A shot of ice through her arm warned her seconds before she smiled up at the boy who popped up next to her. Ahmad, his little sister was in Dawn’s chemistry class. The official story was that he died in a biking accident. By the time he was dust under her feet, Buffy was long gone. Dawn looked down at the stake in her hand and sighed, turning back towards home. She wrapped the sweater around her waist after a block and held her arms out to the cool night air. 

 

 

She treated Tara to milkshakes and cheesy-jalapeno fries. 

“I found my breathing machine.”

“Oh?”

“Does the cure always hurt worse than the disease?”

“Please let me mend the hole in that sweater. You can watch me the whole time, I promise I won’t hurt it.”

“Want to watch a stupid movie with lots of explosions and guys without shirts?”

“Only for you.”

 

 

In all the time that she had memory, Janice had been her one and greatest friend. They weren’t the kind of girls anyone would write a movie about – too hard to be sticky sweet, but maybe not reckless enough to be a cautionary tale. Just friends. They even shared clothes every once in a while, except _her favorite sweater_. Not that Janice would wear something like that anyway. 

She remembered Dawn’s fifteenth birthday the way she forgot most everything else: three days later and a shopping spree on her mother’s emergency credit card. 

Over root beer floats in the mall food court surrounded by shopping bags Janice rolled her eyes, “Dad is in Jamaica with his new assistant, she’ll probably just laugh at the bill and then take an extra Pilates class.”

“Have you met her?”

“My _mother_? I live with the moron.”

“Have you met the assistant?”

“Peter? Yeah,” she shrugged and slurped on her root beer. “He delivered a bouquet of flowers for mom last month when dad was away on a business trip.”

“Does she always bond with his… mistresses?”

“When they’re delivering flowers for her birthday and end up crying in the kitchen about him being away shacking up with a young honey.”

She popped up and sashayed over to the gyro stand. Dawn grinned into her root beer when a group of senior guys watched her walk by. She was wearing a dangerously short skirt and knee-high socks. Dawn was never amazed at the way she always managed to time the sway of her hips to an empty room – catching the waves and tides of other girls and riding in on the energy they leave behind. 

As if every room was always in a state of preparing itself to be empty so she could make the best entrance. 

She came back with a tray of fries that she’d only pick at while Dawn slathered hers in soy sauce and ketchup. Dawn picked a piece of lint off her sweater and thought about her wardrobe of worn jeans and scuffed sneakers. 

“You keep me around because I’m not competition, don’t you?”

Janice rolled her eyes and picked up a French fry between her finger and thumb delicately, “Duh, I keep you around because you’re like, the best competition.”

Dawn grabbed a hot sauce off the table next to them, leftover from a family and their mound of tacos, adding it to the soy-and-ketchup mound on her side of the plastic tray, “Yeah of course, how did I not see it before?”

“You’re like the Thora Birch – the … damn I can’t wait for you to have a Goth-phase. Fishnets on those long legs?”

“I’ll pencil that right in after my lesbian phase and my pot-head, hippie phase.”

Janice snorted, “Everyone saves their lesbian phase for sophomore year of college. Please don’t make me wait that long.”

Dawn looked up and Janice’s eyes were sparkling with mischief. She grinned helplessly and probably a little foolishly. Janice rolled her eyes and grinned back, “The cute one is totally checking you out and that—” she pointed at the glop of sauces Dawn was dipping a handful of fries into, “— is disgusting.”

They giggled and talked about the clothes they bought and Miss Herman’s hairy mole and the guys on the football team and the band playing at the Bronze that weekend. The group of guys Janice had worked so hard to attract left without her even noticing.

As they walked home, Janice’s voice turned serious for a split second before lapsing back into her girlish irreverence. “I think she likes the string of men more than she actually cares about him. Probably more than he even does. Like, he hurts them so that she can pick up the pieces and feel like… something other than the discarded wife.”

As Dawn sorted through the bags full of things she’d never wear, Buffy popped her head around the doorway, “Pizza for dinner?”

Dawn shrugged, “Sure, I guess.”

Buffy’s gaze flickered over the bags on the bed and her brow furrowed like she was about to question her. Dawn held her breath, hoping for… she didn’t know what. The phone rang in the kitchen and like that, Dawn was once again alone in her room. A soft voice called up the stairs, “Duty calls. I’ll be back soon.”

In the morning, Dawn shrugged on her backpack over _her favorite sweater_ , “Pizza tonight?”

Buffy looked up from the bowl she had been washing for the last five minutes, “That sounds great.”

“So what kind of demon was it?”

“What?”

“Last night the…?” Dawn shook her head, “I’m late for school. See you tonight.”

“Have a good day.”

She spent the night at Janice’s, who insisted on dressing her in one of the shortest skirts she owned in the morning. They made lasagna while her mom drank wine at the kitchen table and painted her toenails. They ate on pillows on the living room floor and watched a documentary about pirates while their toenails dried – a line of six sets of bright pink toes stretched out in front of them.

 

 

“Is it weird that I only have one friend?”

“That snotty one with the short skirts, right?”

“Just answer the question.”

“I don’t know. When I was your age, I didn’t have any friends. Unless you count my sisters… or my tutor.”

“You had a tutor?”

“Every respectable young man had a tutor in those days.”

“I don’t think that family and teachers count.”

“Well… eventually there was Dru. And Darla and Angel.”

“Gross. You are officially the worst at giving advice.”

“You didn’t ask for advice.”

“Wow me with your brilliance and insight.”

“If you want another friend, just go get one.”

“Friendship isn’t a new dress, Spike. You can’t just pick up a new one at the mall.”

“Friendship is _so_ like a new dress.”

“Oh, this is going to be great. No smoking in the house.”

“How ‘bout I sit on the window? Now the cig is outside.”

“Alright, Romeo, but if my room reeks of smoke…”

“Do you want to hear my brilliant insight or not?”

Dawn put her pencil down in the binding of her Chemistry book and closed it, folding her arms over her chest. “Am I Luke or Anakin in this scenario, oh wise masterful one?”

“Jaina, obviously. Now pay attention.” Spike took a long drag of his cigarette, “When my mother and sisters wanted a new dress, the fitter would come to the house – or I would escort them to the shop if they didn’t want to wait for a private appointment. First there was the measuring, and then the style, and then the fabric, and then maybe another style, and then a sample, and then a week later more measuring and adjustments and _then_ a box would be delivered.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“If you’re not going to take this seriously.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“Speak 21st century then.”

“If you want to make new friends, you have to risk trying on some things that don’t fit first. And then you have to _work_ at it.”

“What if I can’t? What if the monks didn’t write that into me?”

“Bollocks.”

“Hey! I don’t know. No one knows— _you_ don’t.”

“I think you’re more afraid of succeeding than failing.”

“You’re not always right, you know.”

“The only thing that you need to know is that this time, I am.”

 

Ahmad had two sisters, it turned out. Naila and Sania. Twins. Gorgeous, self-assured, practical girls. Who were both pretty popular, Dawn found out when she tried to ask one to have a Chemistry jam-session. Naila was the reluctant one – she said yes in a way that made you feel like she really, really wanted you to suddenly have other plans. Sania abandoned her sister in the library and sat ten feet away with her own friends. 

For three weeks, Naila and Dawn bent over Chemistry textbooks and Dawn pretended not to understand as much as she did. On the third week, Naila joined them. And that’s when Dawn realized that this wasn’t working.

She couldn’t make up for their dead brother by asking them for help on her chemistry homework. 

She couldn’t make friends with a couple of _painfully_ normal girls who honestly believed that their brother died in a freak biking accident. What did she have in common with girls like that? Girls who woke up in the morning and were sure that they were real, who were sure about the world being a relatively safe place where bad things didn’t happen. 

It was easy enough to cancel her plans with Naila, who looked equally confused and relieved, and assured her in calm tones that her chemistry skills were pretty rad anyway. She walked away down the hall with her sister and Dawn either felt more alone or more at peace with her strange life or neither. She wasn’t sure if it mattered either way, anyway. She went to the mall with Janice and stole her first pair of earrings that probably cost a month’s worth of Buffy’s salary at the Doublemeat Palace. 

 

A week later she’s on her way home from the mall, a failed Chemistry test in her backpack Buffy is supposed to sign, when she saw Naila and Sania walking through a park with a little boy between them. He’s maybe seven or eight and Dawn can tell he’s crying, limping a little. Sania had a baseball mitt and bat in the crook of her arm and Naila was whispering something to the boy as he hiccups. 

“Naila! Hey!?”

The three of them stopped and eyed Dawn warily; Sania looked over her shoulder impatiently. Dawn looked past them and saw a few boys playing innocuously at the baseball diamond. Naila smiled a little crookedly, “Hello Dawn.”

Dawn bent down a little to the boy, who shrunk away from her, “Did you come in too rough on the home plate?”

“What?” Sania’s voice was harsh. 

Dawn straightened, “He’s limping a little I thought…” 

The two girls shift a little in front of him, eyes haunted in a way that Dawn feels all too familiar with.

“How far away is home?”

“Only three blocks.”

Dawn shrugged off her backpack and gestured to the bench a little ways away, off the main path and in a patch of trees, “I have a first aid kit. Let’s get him bandaged up before you try walking all that way.”

Sania’s eyes fluttered back to the boys in the baseball diamond, that Dawn could now see were silently watching them walk away.

“I also have pepper spray,” Dawn’s voice is hard when she says it. Hard enough that Naila starts silently laughing. As if the idea that scrawny little Dawn Summers might know what to do with pepper spray if push came to shrug was laughable.

When the boy was settled on the park bench, Dawn handed the first aid kit to Naila and ran her fingers softly along the boy’s limbs. “Doesn’t seem like they broke anything.” She hissed at the cut under his eye, “Got a real shiner there, buddy. What’s your name?”

“Malik.”

“That’s really nice.”

“My sisters named me.”

Dawn smiled, “Well they are pretty cool, huh?”

He nodded. 

She held up the rubbing alcohol, “This is going to hurt, so I need you to be real brave, okay?”

The grim determination in his eyes almost made her sob, but she went through the rest of her ministrations without him making a sound. He had a nasty bruise on his right calf that was causing the limping, but nothing seemed to be broken or sprained. Dawn rubbed some of the Chinese herbal rub Angel had turned Buffy onto several years back for bruising and handed the small container over to Sania with instructions and a few places she could get more. 

In the five minutes that she had cleaned and bandaged him up (suddenly thankful that she insisted on those _Batman_ Band-Aids a few months back), Malik started smiling and by the time they were ready to leave, he had bounced up and was skipping along ahead of his sisters. The momentary pain from his fight now gone. 

When he was out of earshot and they were clear of the park, Dawn cleared her throat, “He’ll be okay.”

“No he won’t. No one should have to grow up like that, he’ll die just like Ahmad,” Sania’s eyes glinted and tears ran down her cheeks. 

“Sania hush. That’s none of Dawn’s business.”

“I thought Ahmad died in a biking accident,” Dawn swallowed down the memory of a tall boy with a soft smile distorted by yellow eyes and sharp teeth. 

Sania laughed, like glass scraping across stone, “Yeah. A _biking_ accident.”

“Sania, please…”

Sania shook her head at her sister and jogged up to Malik, flinging him up into the air and laughing with him. 

“Naila, what was…”

“Ever since 9/11 things have gotten harder. Ahmad’s body… it was so badly beaten Sania is certain it couldn’t have been a biking accident but for our mother…”

“What happened to Malik today?”

Naila sniffed, “Those boys, Dawn. They can’t be more than nine? Ten, maybe? They grabbed his bat from him and called him a — a —they called him nasty things and… he didn’t even _fight back_.”

Dawn fell silent, chewing her lip. Vampires she could handle, demons, creepy-crawlies. Humans with dark hearts for no other reason but vulgar humanity, she didn’t have a weapon to wipe that away. 

“I know your sister… I mean. Everyone knows your sister. She’s great, you know? Ahmad knew her when she was at school. He told us – to ask her for help if anything ever… but he wasn’t prepared for things to be bad in a way that …” Naila stopped and turned to Dawn, “Sania didn’t want to start wearing the _hijab_. She wanted to wait. She thinks – ammi thinks… we’re too young. But she didn’t want me to be the only girl with a hijab at school. So she started wearing hers earlier than she wanted. Thought that less people would say stuff.”

Dawn’s hands made fists behind her back, her fingernails pressing into her palm, “No one…”

“ _Everyone_. Even our friends. The guidance counselor pulled us aside several times to ask us if our dad forced us, if our dad beat us, if we were unhappy, if we were in an arranged marriage or something, as if bābā would _ever_. I threw up in the girl’s locker room and Sania looked at homeschooling. You were the only one that didn’t ask or say something stupid.” 

Dawn blinked at her, “I honestly didn’t even notice.”

Naila laughed, “Sania bet me five bucks that you were too self-absorbed.”

“I am. Or at least… I’ve had a lot going on?”

Nalia smiled ruefully, “Our friends, they mean well. I know they don’t know how much their questions hurt. Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing or whatever. It was just refreshing not to have to deal with … ” Naila shook her head, “Why did you stop our study sessions? I saw your test today, you failed. You’re better at Chemistry than Sania and I combined.”

Dawn shrugged, “I thought you didn’t like me.”

Naila narrowed her eyes, “And stupid apparently.”

“You’re really intimidating, you know that right?”

“Because we’re brown?” Sania’s edge reminded Dawn distantly of Faith’s; the kind of girl who found herself backed against the wall but kept on laughing and refused to stop fighting. 

“Because you are _gorgeous_ and popular and like… put-together.” Dawn winked at Malik, “Aren’t your sisters the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen?”

“They’re not so great,” he said, poking his tongue out at his sisters and running ahead as they shouted and ran after him.

Their mother, who introduced herself as Mrs. Khan, met them at the door, her eyes kind and soft. She exclaimed that she had heard _so much_ about Dawn, which took her by surprise. They tried to get Dawn to stay for dinner, but she begged them off – taking a Tupperware full of food that Mrs. Khan forced into her hands, with a slight shake of her head at Dawn’s skinny frame. Naila walked her down the path to the street and hugged her goodbye, demanding that they continue their Chemistry sessions. 

“Nah… I mean – I don’t really need help with Chemistry and neither do you guys.”

“I didn’t think of it so much as helping us with Chemistry as it was a friend kicking me in the ass so I’d do my work.”

Dawn took a step back, “You have plenty of friends. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” 

Naila rolled her eyes, “See you on Tuesday.”

 

 

Dawn walked home to her empty house, put the Tupperware of food in the fridge, and took off _her favorite sweater_. She stood in the kitchen and stared at it for a moment, laid it out on the kitchen island and smoothed down the edges, fingering the small patch of Tara’s mending in the shoulder. Earlier that week Willow had noticed the sweater and asked Dawn if it was new, before breezing out the door – not even waiting for the answer. It had been the cause of so many arguments when Buffy was gone and now it meant nothing. 

Dawn stood in the silent kitchen in her empty house and cried and swore to herself that it was the last time that she would cry for her sister’s death, or her sister’s life, or for the life they had before. So their lives were coated in death now… maybe that’s all they’d ever had. Maybe they had been better at pretending before. Maybe there was no reason to pretend anymore with their mother dead and their mortality a trick of light that signified nothing. 

She washed the sweater and dried it, eating the food Kaiya had given her and calling Janice to hear the latest gossip in the meantime, and then slung it over the edge of Buffy’s bed where she had first found it. 

 

 

_They were still living in Los Angeles and maybe things weren’t perfect, but Dawn was too young to know otherwise. She’ll maybe have problems in future relationships because she doesn’t know a reality in which love isn’t demonstrated in the moments of silence between battles._

_They were still living in Los Angeles and dad took them out shopping and for ice cream. Dawn wants to remember that mom was there, but then Buffy reminds her every time that she comes in later in the story._

_There’s a little boutique squished between two name-brand places – one of those expensive, one-of-a-kind places that they aren’t allowed to touch things in – and in the window Buffy sees the cardigan._

_It’s bright ruby-red and has purple flowers on the collar with little sparkling gems in the center, with little hand-painted wooden buttons with purple flowers._

_She squeals so loud a passerby stops to make sure that she hasn’t hurt herself. They stand and stare at it for about twenty minutes, Dawn’s legs hurt and she starts to ask about that ice cream they were promised. Dad won’t go in even to ask how much it is and Buffy won’t leave the mall without it. There are tears in her eyes and so Dawn says, “Daddy, don’t make Buffy cry.”_

_They take it home and it’s the only purchase of the day. It fits Buffy’s narrow shoulders like a glove. Dawn thinks she was born to wear this sweater and only this sweater. Mom looks at the receipt and raises her eyebrows at their father, but ends up laughing and wrapping Buffy in a hug, whispering something about only being young once._

_Buffy wears that sweater at least once a week. She can’t wear it more than that without her friends teasing her and she nearly doesn’t care. She goes on her first date in that sweater and a blue dress. She does her homework, she watches television with Dawn, she grows and somehow the sweater grows with her._

_The wooden buttons are the first to go. Buffy just smiles and drags their mother off to _Michaels_ to get more. They opt for plain red ones. She sews them on herself, brow furrowed in concentration and their mother laughing from the corner of the kitchen. They are nearly to Sunnydale, Dawn can tell – there’s something about the memory that rings of pain. Like that moment right before you fall, the scent of blood lingering in the air even if you catch yourself and none is spilt. _

_One night, Dawn finds Buffy crying over the sweater, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, dirt covering her favorite pair of jeans. There’s a small rip on the right shoulder, Buffy fingers it softly and cries without making a sound. Downstairs, the front door slams and they don’t know yet that it’s the last time their father will walk through it. Buffy tugs on Dawn’s hair, “You’re growing so fast, soon you’ll be taller than me.” She wraps the sweater around her shoulders and then says something about taking a shower. Dawn sits on the floor of her sister’s room and smells blood and ash and grass and sweat on the sweater. Her sister is supposed to smell like flowers and laughter, not death. She lays the sweater on the bed and pretends that her world didn’t just change in every possible way._

_The little flowers fall off one at a time. They hold on until Sunnydale, at least. Dawn imagines those little purple flowers are still somewhere under all the rubble of what is left of Sunnydale High. Dropped in math class or in the library or in the science lab, a trail of petals that gets worn from shoes kicking them about._

_The sweater almost seems new without the flowers. More adult. Buffy packs it in her boxes that she takes with her to college and maybe it’s lost a little bit of its color and it doesn’t have the things about it that once made her stand outside a window and beg to own it, but it is still part of her and so it goes with her to college._

_It’s always been there. Losing little bits of itself as they grow up._

 

A few weeks later, Buffy came down the stairs wearing _her favorite sweater_ and beamed at Dawn, “Do you remember when I got this?”

 

 

That afternoon, after a chemistry jam with Naila and Sania (loaded down with baked goods from their mother), Dawn went to the mall alone and systematically robbed each and every store she went into. 

Just little things, you understand, a bracelet here, a scarf there, a tube of lipgloss. Little things no one will miss. Her pockets and bra are full of shoelaces and keychains and tiny, unacknowledged things that no one will notice have gone missing. No one looks at her sideways. In the bookstore, she slipped a copy of _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ into her messenger bag and no one bats an eye. That night, she lay all of her goodies down on her desk and smiled at them. 

 

 

_Does she think they are the same? Probably not consciously, she’s fifteen._

_Or maybe she does._

_Maybe she looks down at her stack of stolen goodies and thinks, **Me**. _

_Which version is more palpable?_

 

She has an “A” in chemistry and a “D” in English, she stole a rare copy of an annotated Sumerian text and translated it into English in her room under the cover of daylight. She wrote an elaborate essay on the translation of the same text in her English textbook that is incorrect and was given a failing grade. She was supposed to read _To Kill a Mockingbird_ and no one believed that she can read ancient Sumerian. 

She created a false name for herself on the Internet and passive aggressively leaves comments on essays, just to get in fights about nothing. She cackled to herself in the school library. She’s supposed to be in History class, instead she’s arguing with a stay-at-home mother about the pros and cons of breastfeeding. She photo-shopped a picture of herself with a pregnant belly and three children. They look just like her, but just enough not to be believable. She failed her computer programming final because she’s too busy creating her own website to attend. 

She thinks about contacting Oz about being a weird genius that never passes classes, and then can’t remember if he knows she exists. She’s seen him – from the top of the stairs, from behind a door, from the window – but has ever seen her? Does he have memories of her?

She wrote a short story about a girl slipping away, locked in a room that is disappearing before her eyes. She submitted it to the school newspaper. The editor says she plagiarized _The Yellow Wallpaper_ and notes that next time, they’ll inform the principal. She burned the copy of her story in the kitchen sink and they think that she just had a weird food experiment gone wrong. 

 

The junior editor of the school newspaper was a girl named Celeste and she may be the tallest human Dawn has ever encountered. She still manages to look like a dwarf next to her football-boyfriend. Some bonehead with a name Dawn can’t be fucked to remember. Maybe it’s just her _presence_ that makes her appear so tall. Or maybe Dawn spends too much time around really short people. She’s also the captain of the junior girls’ volleyball team and the pitcher for the softball team. She has lots of awards and her picture is in the yearbook a lot.

Dawn has one picture in the yearbook, generally speaking. Last year she was too busy running away from a band of Renaissance-faire rejects trying to kill her so there is an asterisk next to her name at the back of the book they sent her three weeks after finals that says _not pictured_. 

Celeste stopped Dawn on her way out of their Digital Photography class and smiled down at her genially, “So I’m here to offer my services as an English tutor for you.”

Dawn rolled her eyes and continued walking down the hall. Which didn’t deter Celeste. She thinks maybe not many things would. 

“It’s just that it’s my community service project for the year to tutor those in the sixty to seventy percent range and the guidance counselor who is overseeing my service hours forwarded me your schedule. You went from a four-point-oh as a freshman to being one of the lowest ranked sophomores so I’m just—”

“You’re just here to pick up your newest charity case?” Dawn stopped abruptly and turned to face her pursuer. 

Celeste did _not_ take a spill in the middle of the hallway, thanks mostly to reflexes honed on one athletic field or another. She smiled down at Dawn, her face stretching tight, “Look. You’re obviously too smart for this program. Just let me tutor you for one hour a week and it’ll get the counselor off both our backs.”

Dawn narrowed her eyes, “Wait. Isn’t this like an invasion of privacy or something?”

“The guidance counselor – Mrs. Adler? She talked to you about this, you agreed to have a tutor assigned to you.” Celeste pulled a paper out of her binder and waved it in front of Dawn’s face, “You signed a release form.”

“Oh,” Dawn tried to think about the last time she was called to the office. She couldn’t. She brushed her hair back from her face nervously.

“I always bring snacks,” Celeste hedged. 

“I have a chemistry study session every Tuesday and Thursday in the library; Mondays, Fridays, and weekends I go to work… kinda. It’s like a family-owned shop and I’m supposed to be there in the afternoons, so if Wednesday is out for you then—”

“Wednesdays are totally fine with me! Where would you prefer to go? My other sessions meet in the school library but, it’s totally up to you.”

Dawn looked at her watch and sighed, “Library is fine. Three to four, right?”

“Can’t wait!”

Dawn started to walk away and then reconsidered, pulling another U-turn that nearly knocked over a couple of freshmen making out against a locker. She had to speed down the hall a bit to catch her, but it almost seemed like Celeste was waiting for her. “Look, I’m sorry for being an asshole.”

“It’s okay!”

“No. Look. It’s not. I _am_ an asshole. I flunked English because I refused to do the given assignment because, like it or not, I know that I’m smarter than most people at this shit school.” 

Celeste opened her mouth and then shut it, tilting her head to the side a bit. 

“How about some ground rules, okay?”

“Okay,” Celeste nodded, smiling to someone a bit as they walked by. “We each get two rules the other can’t veto.”

“First rule, no lying. Which means no more of this sunshiney-pollyanna-rainbows-crap. Maybe you really are this nice, that’s fine, but don’t put on a show for my account anymore,” Dawn steeled herself, but Celeste’s broad smile just turned into something a little crooked and a little mischievous, her eyes sparkling.

“Rule two, actually show up to every session unless there’s a dire emergency.”

“Rule three, tell me straight when I’m being an asshole.”

“Rule four…” Celeste hesitated and then bit her lip a little. “Oh what the hell, rule four: don’t think of this as tutoring, just think of it as a study session. I won’t force you to be my friend, but don’t force me to be a teacher. You don’t need one and it’ll just embarrass us both.” Celeste looked around the hallway and then leaned down a little, “Truth is, like four other people have already turned me down today and I really am not a very good tutor, you’re doing me a favor.”

Dawn nodded, she understood feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place, “You _have_ to make me to the assignments though. I’m going to fight you on that a lot.”

Celeste’s eyes twinkled, “If you’ll do the same for me.”

“Deal.” Dawn hesitated. “Will there still be snacks?”

“Are snacks too Pollyanna?”

She straightened her shoulders, “Everybody needs snacks.”

“Good. Because you are going to _die_ over my white fudge brownies!”

“You seriously are a dork.”

“And you aren’t as big of an ass as you think you are.”

 

 

She takes more things. Larger things. Shoes, clothes, a tennis racket. She gives the tennis racket to Malik who turns it into a prop for his Halloween costume. She doesn’t feel more alive or more real when she’s taking things, she stops feeling anything at all. She wonders if she was really feeling anything before. 

 

“Maybe it was all an illusion,” she said to Janice, spreading black polish on her nails. 

“Maybe you’re psychotic and should consider a therapist.”

“What if it was? What if none of this was real?” Dawn gestured to herself, but Janice doesn’t see. Probably better that way. 

“Like the _Matrix_? Girl, I haven’t had enough to drink for that kind of conversation.”

 

She slipped a copy of _The Matrix_ into her bag and a CD into the pocket of the man next to her. The security alarm went off and he got loud. She slipped away. She watched it five times in one weekend and then smashed it into little pieces before throwing it into the trash. 

She’s not a hero, she’s no Neo; he lived in a world of words and made them bend to his will. She’s just a teenage girl that was never real at all and has no power at all. 

She made grilled cheese and jam sandwiches for dinner with chocolate milk and cheese puffs. 

 

Janice comes with her on her shopping adventures and giggles a little too loudly making it either more exciting or more risky or both. Dawn grows more and more frustrated until Janice finally asks what the hell it is that she’s looking for. 

She thinks of that ecstatic gaze Buffy had staring in the window at the red sweater with little purple flowers and looks around the boutique, her heart thumping. 

Her fingers lingered on a necklace with an Eiffel Tower pendant, “For it to mean something.”

Janice snorted and grabbed the necklace, putting it around her neck and slipping the pendant beneath her shirt, “Whatever. Mine now.”

 

She treated Tara to milkshakes and cheesy fries. They still do that sometimes. 

Maybe it would have been better to go to Willow, but she really was trying to stay away from magic right now and … well Spike has been AWOL lately. 

Tara smiled her soft smile and Dawn can’t ask the question she’s longing to ask. 

_Help? Please help me?_

It claws at her throat and begs for release, but she can’t quite make the words come out. 

Because that same plea is reflected in every pair of eyes that she sees.

“I’m so glad that we can still do this,” she said instead.

Tara took her hand, “I’ll always be here for you.”

Dawn wants to be strong, wants to say that she’s there, too. That Tara can lean on her. That she can carry more. But she can’t. She’s too weak. She feels at any moment that she might snap in two from the burden she carries. And all she carries is her own, broken heart. 

“Thank you,” is all she can say. 

Because it’s true in all the ways it isn’t. And they are as truthful as they can be. 

Which these days is less and less than ever. 

 

 

“Do you believe in magic?”

Naila snorted, “Like glass slippers and fairy godmothers?”

“No… like demons and potions and stuff.”

Sania’s face whitens even as she says flippantly, “You’re so funny, Dawn. One is as ridiculous as the other.”

“What if… What if I told you—”

“Don’t,” Dawn’s never heard Sania’s voice turn so hard. “Whatever it is that you _think_ you need to tell us, just don’t.”

“What if I need help?”

They stand up, books already in their arms. Sania turns away before Naila can say what they both need her to hear, “Ask someone else.”

In the empty library, Dawn looked down at her chemistry book and whispered, “There is no one else.”

 

She begins her project alone in earnest. Okay so the spell says that she needs two people otherwise “DANGER” but she can handle herself. She’s good at this. This is _her world_. She siphons off the ingredients she needs from the Magic Box and Anya is none the wiser. She works a few extra hours without getting paid as a way to appease her guilt. She finds multiple translations of the spell to compare hers to – she emails a professor in India and they have a rousing debate over masculine vs. feminine pronouns in Archaic Latin that ends with a promise for coffee if they are ever in the same country. 

 

 

Celeste for the most part let her work on whatever she needed to work on, as long as all her assignments were done first. She tried dismissing a simple worksheet once and the hell Celeste brought down on her wasn’t anything that she wanted to revisit. Dawn took to completing her English homework during lunch so that her sessions with Celeste could be mostly time for her own research. Anything that went on in the Magic Box was under suspect and she hated being in her house alone all of the time. 

Researching while Celeste broke out her editing for the newspaper actually became something of a habit. A little too quickly for Dawn, but she found with Celeste it was easier to just flow with the tide than fight it. Occasionally Celeste would ask Dawn a question or for some input and on rare occasions, Dawn would do the same. Celeste, as it turned out, was practically a walking thesaurus. All that SAT-prep she was doing sharpened her vocabulary to an unexpected level. Despite the school having a perfectly acceptable editing program installed on the computers – and even email – Celeste insisted on doing all of her editing by hand, with an army of multi-colored highlighters and pens spilled out over the table. Which tilted Dawn’s begrudging acceptance into a strange feeling of loyalty.

“You know, you really shouldn’t fight the institution so much.”

“What does that mean?” Dawn looked up from her books to see Celeste still buried in a pile of papers, her long black hair pulled away from her face with a pencil. 

“I mean I read the story you submitted to the paper. Dinah – the senior editor – is the one that pegged it a ‘cry for help’ and sent it along to the guidance office. I would have just published it.”

“Why?”

Celeste pushed a strand of hair that had escaped back behind her ear, “Because it was fucking good, that’s why.” She pointed at the scars on Dawn’s arm, “You aren’t suicidal and you aren’t a melodramatic teenager begging for mommy’s attention.”

“My mom’s dead.”

Celeste – being Celeste – grinned boldly at her and Dawn had to catch herself before smiling back, “See?”

“No. I actually don’t.”

“Jesus, Summers you usually aren’t this obtuse. Look. Your story was good. You knew it was. You sent it in just to cause problems. Not because you wanted attention, just because you wanted to have a good old laugh at the school’s expense.”

“Maybe I just thought it was good,” Dawn snatched a carrot stick up out of Celeste’s perfectly ordered pile, disrupting the rest and causing one to roll to the floor. 

“Is that why you re-translated a passage from your History textbook and wrote an essay on the ethics of translation instead of the book report that was due on _Hamlet_? Because you thought it was _good_?”

“That paper _is_ good.”

“But it’s not what they asked for. If you would just do what they asked…”

“Then I’d be bored.”

“Then you’d have the grades to get into the kind of school that would celebrate your stories and your weird knowledge of Sumerian instead of reprimanding you for it. Anyway, it’s not like you don’t have the time to do both, you choose not to just to piss people off.”

Dawn sullenly went back to her dusty books on magic and memory spells. 

At the end of the hour, Celeste stood up and put her arms around Dawn in a strange show of friendship, “Someday I’m gonna have a bookshelf in my house that will be full of the shit you pull off, but only if you stop fighting.”

“Stop fighting what?”

Celeste shrugged and picked up her stacks of papers and books, “From the looks of you, honey, you’re fightin’ anything and everything that you can get your hands on. Except you haven’t figured out that most of us aren’t fighting you back.”

 

 

It takes her a few weeks to get everything together, but no one really notices the growing collection of magic paraphernalia in her room. So that’s … not unexpected. 

She thinks maybe this whole experience of living is making her very wary of trusting people in general. She says ominous things in front of Buffy and Willow – maybe in an attempt for them to stop her, or maybe just to see what will happen. The self-hatred that pours out of their eyes is enough to either keep her going or stop her in her tracks. They’ll never know how close that sting of their own guilt pricks at her secret desires. 

She wishes she had been written to be harder. Written to take pleasure where she so desperately wants it. Maybe those monks didn’t know anything about girls; maybe they made her the way they wanted girls to be. 

 

 

“They should tear that shitty thing down,” Janice wrinkled her nose.

Dawn looked up from the scrap of paper with an address for a used bookstore in her palm and saw – standing before her as if it was waiting – the tower.

Glory’s tower. 

She didn’t think of it most of the time, it wasn’t a space on her internal map of Sunnydale. The bookstore address was just an address; just another faceless place in Sunnydale, to think that walking there would pass her by this tower was inconceivable. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dawn almost believed that the spaces in Sunnydale that held the most pain disappeared into dust after a certain amount of mourning. Like Dracula’s castle, or Angel’s mansion, or the old Sunnydale High School Library. In her mind, these places were piles of rubble or had disappeared completely when they were no longer needed.

What did Sunnydale need with a an old tower that lead to nowhere and only signified pain?

“What was it supposed to be?” Dawn choked out, looking up at it as if it were the first time. 

“My mom thinks it was going to be some meeting place for a cult or something,” Janice turned away, her interest waned. “What do you need at this bookstore anyway?”

“A book,” Dawn murmured, her face still tilted up to her platform. 

Janice snorted.

She felt numb. She felt angry. She felt defeated. Maybe they won in the end. So she didn’t raise a hell on earth the way they planned, didn’t mean that her world wasn’t twisted into a nightmare anyway. Or what felt like a nightmare, turns of extreme focus and energy followed by long spells of fatigue and a blurry sense of time.

She turned away and slung her arm around her friend’s waist. “Maybe this one will have a Japanese porn section!”

“Gross. I’m still mad at you for the time you showed me that tentacle shit,” Janice put her arm around Dawn’s shoulders. “You still have to make up for that, you know.”

Dawn giggled, ignoring her heavy heart, “What about that necklace I got you last week.”

“You _stole_ that necklace!”

“Isn’t it the thought that counts?”

Glory’s words echo in her ear as she walks away, the picture of suburban teen happiness, following a clue to a truth she may not be ready for, a memory that will either solidify her or break her apart permanently.

_This body ... it's just a rental, Dawnie._  
Being human?  
It's like a costume for girls like you and me.  
Being something else,  
**that's what we are**. 

On a Tuesday afternoon in early December she cancelled chemistry with Naila and Sania and went home to her empty house. It’s always empty despite the ghosts that walk through it. One with red hair and one wiry and blonde. She wants to believe that they are both alive. She watches _The Others_ alone, a lot and wonders if maybe she is the ghost. Maybe she’s seeing everything backwards. Maybe she’s been dead all along – dead on the top of that tower, her blood giving birth to monsters. That Tuesday there were no ghosts except her, she closed the front door but didn’t lock it (maybe she’s tempting fate) (maybe they stopped locking the door years ago because their worst nightmares had already wandered inside and what was left that a measly wooden door and brass lock could really keep out?) and went up to her room, closing the door.

She drew a circle around herself with sand and thought back to the day – just last year – when she watched her sister do the very same thing. A spell to reveal her for what she really was: transient, insubstantial, fleeting – just the figment of someone’s imagination made flesh and easily dismissed, not even solid enough to touch. 

Funny how solid she felt now, kneeling on the floor in her room, the carpet tickling her ankles where they were bare between her jeans and her shoes. Funny how skin can escape even the simplest disguises; finding its way out to rub against the world, to tangle with it, to prove to itself that it is real. She ran her thumb against the thin skin that covers her anklebone, feeling the bone underneath. Is that really all a human is? Just a paper-thin layer of fragile skin and underneath so much mulch?

She looked down at her handwritten notes, pieces of spells combined with others, combining magic not done in centuries. If she fails she could die… maybe. End up worse than one of Glory’s victims – spitting nonsense from a brain no longer capable of cognizant thought. 

She could erase herself. 

She thought of her sister’s haunted face, of Willow’s tear-stained cheeks, of Tara’s broken heart. Erasure almost sounds like a good idea. Maybe it would fix things. Not in the way that a sharp knife in a bathtub full of warm water slowly turning clear to pink to red would. In a permanent way. In a way to turn back the clock. 

She could disappear as if she never was. 

And that’s the worst-case scenario.

“I’ve been through worse,” she said aloud. 

“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime, because this looks pretty bad,” Sania’s tone was teasing the way she teases: hard and short. Like someone wrote over the page of her lines, _staccato_ , and she liked it so much she took it for granted as part of her personality. 

Dawn didn’t flinch, just looked down at her notebook and thought about what she needs to do next, “What are you doing here?”

“I was going to stop you from doing something stupid,” she circled around to sit cross-legged in front of Dawn, eyes sharp, head uncovered, her hair falling soft and thick to her waist. 

Dawn raised her eyebrows.

Sania rolled her eyes, “Please. No excuses, no lies, and stop pretending like you are sneaky and I wouldn’t notice that you were up to something. Tell me what I need to do.”

Dawn hesitated. 

“No confessions, either.”

Ahmad’s face, charming and laughing, flashes into Dawn’s mind. And then the other image, him falling to dust around her fingertips. She didn’t kill him, but that almost feels worse. 

Sania cleared her throat, “If you confess, then I’ll have to tell Naila and she deserves to … always remember him _alive_.”

Buffy’s hands, bleeding from crawling out of her own grave, her hair full of dirt, her eyes empty. 

“I understand,” and maybe that’s the first time she’s ever said that and meant it. 

“But while we’re not talking about this. If it was you – thank you,” Sania’s eyes filled with tears and she shook them away with a jerk of her head and a smile. “You said you needed help.”

“It’s a really long story.”

“Tell me the short version.”

“I need to find a memory, see if it’s right.”

“Your memories have been tampered with? Is that something that happens often?”

“You said you wanted the short version.”

Sania took a deep breath and nodded, “Man I was really hoping for a simple love spell or something.”

“Love spells are never simple,” and her tone held so much in it, Sania didn’t crack a smile in response.

“What’s our best-case scenario here?”

“That … it works.”

“What’s the worst-case?”

“That I disappear.”

“Am I here to…?”

“You’re my anchor. I’ve heard of witches doing this before Will-- well anyway it’s supposed to work. Not necessarily with this spell but I had to Frankenstein it a bit to get it to do what I wanted.”

“Wait. You wrote your own spell?”

“You wanna leave?”

“No. I’ve seen your chemistry notes, you’re like a science prodigy or something. If anyone can do this, you probably can. It’s just… have you ever done something like this before?”

“Nope.”

Sania shrugged, “First time for everything I guess.”

And that’s why they’ve stayed friends despite their rocky start. 

“Just… what’s _my_ worst-case scenario?”

Dawn handed her a satchel with the same ingredients inside as the one tied around her neck, “You might come with me.”

“Will I disappear if you do?”

“Let’s hope not.” Dawn held out her hands, palm up, “I just need you to hold me here. Focus on me, on your breathing. Don’t let your thoughts wander. Have you ever meditated before?”

“I’m pretty terrible at it.”

“Get good. The more focused you are, the easier it will be for me to come back.”

“Okay, got it,” Sania placed her palms down on Dawn’s. “This is real, isn’t it?”

“As real as I am.”

 

Sania watches Dawn close her eyes and chant in an unknown language. She repeats the same series of sounds over and over again. Sania starts to wonder if it’s working, tries not to let her eyes wander to the clock on Dawn’s bedstand. After maybe a hundred repeats or thirty minutes or whatever comes first, Sania begins to chant with her friend, conscious only of the feel of her palms pressed into Dawn’s palms. She closes her eyes and chants and hopes that she’s doing the right thing. 

Sometimes she sees little flashes of memories – not even full memories, just a tease. The way Dawn’s hair ripples when she pulls it back into a high ponytail when she’s studying. The sound of Dawn’s laughter when she’s teasing Malik. The way she bites her lips sometimes. The way her eyes always seem a little sad even when she’s laughing so hard she falls off her chair. And always, always, the feel of her skin under Sania’s palms. 

_I could get lost here,_ she thinks to the darkness, gripping the hand beneath her own with her fingers. The darkness laughs at her and it smells like Dawn and feels like Dawn and sounds like Dawn, drawing her in. 

And all the while their voices – in tandem – repeating the same meaningless sounds over and over again. 

Sania hopes that the rhythm doesn’t matter because after a while she realizes that she’s changed their pacing and sounds to mimic an old lullaby their mother still sometimes sings to Malik and Dawn’s voice has followed her. They harmonize in a way that feels simple but Sania knows is supremely complicated. But still her lips form the same shapes and still Dawn is solid beneath her fingertips. 

Sania focuses more on the sound of her voice, her skin, the scent of her wafting between the small space between them. She longs to draw this tall, gangly girl up into a hug in a way she’s never felt about anyone other than Naila and her precious brothers. A need to _protect_ growing so strong it nearly takes her over. She sees Ahmad’s face in her mind, but it is distorted – yellow eyes and a shape that is impossible. She gasps and the song falters. 

_You might come with me._ That’s what she said.

Sania opens her eyes and looks at her friend, picking up the song when it comes back to her. Singing softly under her breath. It’s been long enough. It’s time to come home. She speeds up the sounds, pulling with her mind, shocked that the thought makes it nearly feel true. There’s a moment, a hesitation, when it almost feels like Dawn disappears beneath her skin, a trick of light that says there was never a girl in the room to begin with. Sania pours everything into the song, that no longer sounds like anything that her mother would have sung, and begs for her friend to come back, to be real, to be solid. 

_As real as I am._ And Sania suddenly understands, down to her bones, that it wasn’t a joke. 

And then Dawn opens her eyes. 

 

 

“Are you back?”

“Well, it’s over for now.”

“No… I mean. Did it work? Are you back? Wait… for now?”

Dawn smiled, “It worked.”

“Are you…” Sania searched in her mind for the right word, the right way to reveal how close they came to losing the game, to being swept up in the search for memory and getting lost there forever. “Are you real now?”

“As real as I can be.”

Which to Sania’s ears sounded less like hope and more like a plea. 

They vacuumed up the sand and dumped the bag out in the trash by the street and hid the candles and other left-over ingredients in a box under Dawn’s bed. There were about half-a-dozen shoe boxes under her bed that Sania knew were full of shoplifted items, but they didn’t discuss them. Sania definitely didn’t give her a lecture on the perils of shoplifting. Dawn braided Sania’s hair and watched wide-eyed while she explained all the different ways that one can arrange and wear a hijab. They examined the stock in the kitchen and then made up a story to get Naila to come over with ice cream. The three of them made spaghetti and Naila conjured up some meatballs but refused to give Dawn the recipe. 

They never saw Buffy and when Dawn insisted that they leave before sundown, they don’t tease her the way Janice usually does. Naila had her bicycle and Sania had her skateboard, so they should get home rather quickly. 

After she shut the door on her friends, heading back into the kitchen to clean up, Dawn felt a slight tap on her shoulder. 

“You’re as real as I am, Dawn Summers,” Sania said and pulled her into a warm hug. Dawn chuckled and hugged her back, resting her head down on her friend’s shoulder.

“You’re kind of a shrimp,” she said when they broke apart.

“Yeah well, I will totally kick your ass if you tell anyone that I voluntarily hugged you.” At the door she threw over her shoulder, “Especially Naila.”

On the way home, she kept conversations with her sister light and pleasant, teasing the way she always does. Maybe she’s a little bit harder in the way that she plays that night, but she does her best. 

Just before climbing into the top bunk several hours later, Naila looked down at her, “What happened today at Dawn’s before I got there?”

“I called you like within five minutes of arriving.”

“Bull.”

“Naila!”

“Don’t mess with me. I’m two minutes older than you.”

Sania looked up at her sister and thought of her smiling face distorted with rage, eyes yellow, teeth sharp and covered in blood, “We just talked.”

“ _Something_ happened. Please don’t lie to me.”

“We talked about… Ahmad. And her mom you know – she died last year.”

Naila sat down on the bed next to her and sighed, “Poor Dawn. I can’t imagine.”

Sania leaned into her shoulder, resting her head against her sister’s dark curls, “Do you believe in monsters, Naila?”

“There’s enough darkness in this world without believing in our brother’s nonsense.”

“But if he was right…”

“So he’s right. So I still had to dress Malik in a long-sleeve shirt today so that ammi didn’t have to see his bruises from fighting at school. What do monsters matter?” Naila shook her head and stood up.

“Dawn says that we believe in the things that we fear the most. She says it’s the only way to protect ourselves.”

“Did believing in hocus pocus protect Ahmad?”

Sania brushed a tear that fell down her cheek, “No.”

Her sister bent down to hug her, “Dawn belongs to another world, and I can’t follow you there.”

“I know.”

“So don’t ask me to.”

“We should talk to the school. Malik can’t keep hiding his scars from everyone.”

“We’ve tried that before and it got us nowhere.”

“There must be _something_ we can do.”

“Not all monsters disappear into dust just because we want them to.”

Across town, in a dark kitchen, Dawn cleaned her sister’s wounds silently, blood washing away just like a hundred nights before. 

 

 

_They were still living in Los Angeles and maybe things weren’t perfect, but Buffy was too young to notice. She has problems in future relationships because she doesn’t know a reality in which love isn’t demonstrated in the moments of silence between battles._

_They were still living in Los Angeles and dad went out shopping. Buffy was supposed to go, but there was a mystical emergency. He thinks she’s off with her friends, happy and content and doesn’t need him. She’s never needed him more. He comes home with a cardigan that’s maybe a little hideous and definitely supposed to be for a grandma and not for a teenage girl._

_It’s a shocking carnation-red and has gross purple flowers on the collar with fake gems in the center, with over-sized hand-painted wooden buttons with purple flowers._

_She is tired. She hasn’t slept in weeks. She has a destiny hanging over her head and cemetery dirt so far under her fingernails it’ll never come out. She paints them dark colors – reds and purples – to hide the dirt and blood. She’s wearing darker colors lately. She hasn’t adjusted yet. She’s still in mourning for her simple life._

_He brings it home and it’s the only purchase of the day. It hangs off Buffy’s narrow shoulders like a sack. Mom looks at the receipt and raises her eyebrows at her father, starting a fight that lasts into the darkness of night. Under the cover of their shouts, Buffy sneaks out her window in her new sweater and hunts._

_She kills three vampires but the nest she was hoping to clear out is empty, they’ve moved on. The thought worries her. She checks in with her Watcher and doesn’t let him see her cry. She walks home, hugging the sweater tight around her thin frame. There were seven flowers when he gifted it to her just a few hours ago – now there are only five._

_When she walks in the door, her mother is sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine and a stack of papers she doesn’t try to hide. Buffy sits down and takes her mother’s hand in her own and they don’t cry._

_They are alone._

_Buffy shoves the sweater into the back of her closet. She unpacks it in Sunnydale and attacks it with scissors furiously, ripping off the flowers and the buttons. She washes it alone with a cup full of bleach and it comes out a soft blood-orange. She takes some old mismatched buttons from her mother’s barely used sewing kit and sews them on herself, smiling when she pricks her fingers. She wears it around the house when her mother isn’t home._

_She looks at the way it is not what it should be and it reflects her life and she wears it._

_One night, Buffy cries over the sweater, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, dirt covering her favorite pair of jeans. There’s a small rip on the right shoulder, Buffy fingers it softly and cries without making a sound. She thinks of Angelus wearing the face of the man she thought she could love forever and she thinks of him dying with her lips pressed against his. She puts the sweater his fingers ruined into her duffle bag and sneaks out the window of her bedroom for the last time._

_She wears the sweater in Los Angeles waiting tables through the heat of summer, the neck slipping down her shoulder and sleeves baggy around her wrists. She brings it back home with her and lays it on the foot of her bed to remind herself of how much she still has left to lose._

_There’s always more to lose._

_College feels like a new beginning, a new hope, so she doesn’t take it with her, she doesn’t see the sweater and leaves without it._

_There weren’t any answers waiting for her within it._

_There never were._

 

 

Dawn was still cleaning up the remains of Naila’s meatball preparations when Buffy shuffled into the kitchen, nursing a large cut on her forearm. 

“It’s not even dusk yet,” Dawn said as she pulled out the first aid kit from under the kitchen sink. There’s about four or five in the house, but she likes the one in the kitchen best. It’s the most efficient. It’s the one she’s used the most.

“Yeah well,” Buffy grimaced down at the wound. “Duty called.”

Dawn wiped the blood away with a wet rag, she’s already sprinkled some rubbing alcohol on it and Buffy hissed when it touches the wound. “You should really get stitches for this one.”

“Not worth it. It’ll heal overnight.”

“Well then no patrol tonight. This wound will call every vampire within a five-mile-radius.”

“Maybe I should start using bait. Make things easier.”

Dawn wrapped the arm with gauze, “Probably only get wolves that way. Vamps prefer hunting the old fashioned way.”

“Yeah, what’s a vampire without a bad one-liner?” Buffy stepped off the stool and wavered, “I think I lost more blood than I thought.”

“Sit down. What did you eat today?”

“Just snacked at work a little bit,” Buffy smiled. “Even though I guess that’s technically against the rules.”

“Drink. I’ll heat up some leftovers for you,” Dawn pushed a tall glass of orange juice across the kitchen island.

“Hey who’s the big sister here?”

“Me, obviously. I’m taller anyway,” Dawn sniffed at the bag of baby spinach and shrugged. It’s good enough for one more salad. Buffy won’t know the difference. 

“I’m not a rabbit, Dawnie.”

“You need leafy greens, missy.”

“So, how was your day? School okay?”

Dawn stared for a minute before swallowing, “I’m sorry what?”

“I can’t ask how your day was?”

“You _can_ … it’s just…”

“I never do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Just let me ask. How was your day? How’s… um… math?”

Dawn laughed and the microwave chirped, she pulled out the spaghetti and stirred it a few times before setting it down in front of her sister, “Math is fine. I had a couple of friends over for dinner.”

“Janice?”

“No… I’m trying to branch out.”

“That’s nice?”

“You’d like them.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“Hey Buff?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you remember that red sweater – the one that used to have purple flowers on it?”

“Yeah of course, I wore it the other day.”

“Do you remember when dad bought it for you?”

“Sure. You picked it out. You were ecstatic about it. He brought it home and I… I _hated_ it at first. So did mom.”

“Wait. _I_ picked it out?”

Buffy shrugged, “That’s what dad said.”

“But… but I remember you being there. You picked it out.”

“Nope. That was the … you know… burning down the gym weekend. Kinda didn’t have time to go shopping with you guys.”

“But…”

“Why are you asking?”

“No reason. Isn’t it weird though, that I would remember you being there but you weren’t?”

Buffy put her plate in the sink and hugged Dawn from behind, “Don’t worry about it. You were nine and you really wanted me to love it so that’s what you remember. I love it now. I love that you picked it out for me.” She sniffed, “Ugh I’m disgusting. I gotta shower. See you in the morning, kay?”

“But… I wasn’t _real_ when I was nine!” 

The kitchen was already empty. Which was either a pattern or a sign or something. Dawn turned off the light and went to bed.

She dreamt of purple flowers and the sound of Glory cackling. 

 

 

“Oh my god, what the hell is wrong with you today?” Dawn slammed one of her books shut and leaned back in her chair, leveling her gaze at Celeste.

“What is this in regards to?” Generally Dawn wasn’t very chatty and most weeks Celeste had to pull at her just to get a ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ that sounded halfway civil. Discussing genre, editing, the English language, anything in their books, that was one thing. Having an actual conversation about themselves was quite another. 

Dawn shook her head, “You’ve just been _off_ today, I can’t explain it.”

Celeste looked up from her stack of papers, three of her many multi-colored pens and highlighters she used for editing clutched in each hand, hair a bit askew, “We’ve been sitting here for all of ten minutes.” 

“Yeah and you are acting weird.”

“I’m EDITING!”

Somewhere behind them, a librarian tsked disapprovingly and Dawn grinned, “I don’t think a librarian has ever tut-tutted in your direction in the whole of your entire life.”

Celeste blushed. 

“Come on, I see you every week, don’t you think I can tell if something is wrong?”

“Dawn, I have literally _cried_ sitting six inches away from you before and your response was to ask me for a synonym for _celebration_.”

“You were reading the end of _Sloppy Firsts_ , that wasn’t personal that was _literature_.” When Celeste just widened her eyes, Dawn huffed, “Of course I’ve read it, don’t look at me like that.”

“No… I mean… well…”

“I’m OBSERVANT,” Dawn bristled. 

“You really aren’t.”

“Stop changing the subject,” Dawn took a bite of brownie and chewed thoughtfully, “I know when something is weird and you have a weird vibe.”

Celeste took a drink from her thermos of tea and sighed, “It’s nothing.”

“Ah… it’s a relationship _something_ ,” Dawn reached over and snatched the pile of papers in front of her and held them over her head, “You could probably kick my ass, but I have the librarians to back me up – you won’t get these until you tell me.”

“What are you doing, Dawn? You’ve never showed any interest in my personal life before.”

“Either I’m tired of you mooning and disturbing my vibe so I’m forcing you to tell me what’s going on so I can fix it for you and go back to my work,” she waved at the piles of books and scraps of paper in front of her, “ _or_ \- and I know this is a stretch – or I’m actually _not_ an automaton and may give two shits about the people around me.”

“I don’t know… that second one is a bit of a stretch.”

Dawn gave Celeste her best version of an angry glare, which only made the older girl burst into a spasm of giggles. A couple of heads turned in their direction and Dawn turned her glare on them until they went back to studying. 

“Okay… you’re right. It’s a relationship thing, kinda.” 

Dawn thought of the football player that somehow made Celeste look like a magical fairy princess instead of the giant Amazon that she really was and nodded, “Cheating? Different college on the horizon? Wore their socks during sex?” Celeste raised her eyebrows at the last one and Dawn leaned forward to whisper, “I hear that’s a huge turn-off.”

Celeste chuckled softly, “No… it’s nothing like that. It’s not even about _them_. We’ve been together… oh since we were babies. I think they fell for me the year I had a growth spurt and was a good foot and a half taller than everyone… still thought I was magnificent.”

“You are.”

Celeste shook her head, “Anyway, it’s been forever. And yet, you know? Their mom still acts like I was plucked out of the gutter yesterday. No matter what I do, no matter how nice I am or how much I help or how invisible I make myself. We just do _not_ get along.” Celeste looked out the window, “ _My_ mom, she died when I was eight years old. And I guess, I’ve been trying to get her to… like me, love me, fill the void or something; but we can hardly even be civil. I’ve tried everything.”

Dawn chewed on her third brownie silently.

“At this point, I’d just like to get through a dinner without feeling like a leper.”

“Do you feel better, saying it out loud?”

Celeste put the lid back on the brownies, “No more chocolate until we’ve been halfway productive.”

Dawn hedged, “You know, maybe she knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Maybe she knew you were looking for a replacement or something. Maybe she… maybe she didn’t want to get too close unless you guys broke up because then you’d have lost someone else. Or maybe she was worried that you just wanted a family and don’t care about Eli the way you should. Maybe it wasn’t about you at all, maybe she was protecting … everyone.”

Celeste’s eyes glistened.

Dawn shrugged, “That’s what I’d do… I mean, in the unfortunate event that I ever have a teenage son dating someone as amazing as you I’d maybe… keep my distance out of a sense of _helping_ rather than harming.”

The older girl stared at her for a long time without saying anything. 

At the end of the hour, when Celeste stood up to head to softball practice, she looked down and said, “Maybe you are observant.”

“It comes and goes,” Dawn said sullenly, not looking up from her books. 

Someone bumped her table and Dawn swore under her breath, looking down at the huge line of black ink that now spread across her careful notes. She looked up to see who had interrupted her and found Janice smiling across the table from her, sitting in the seat that Celeste had only moments ago vacated. 

“Janice?”

“You forgot my name already, so much for loyalty and friendship,” Janice snapped her gum loudly with a smile. 

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m busting you out,” Janice took on a ridiculous stage-whisper. “We haven’t done anything _fun_ in like weeks.”

Dawn wracked her brain, it _felt_ like she had just made pancakes with Janice at her house a few days ago, but lately time was passing in strange clumps without her noticing, “I’m busy?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Janice raised her eyebrows. And then suddenly she slammed her hands on the desk loudly and stood up, “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DAWN SUMMERS!!!!!”

Every head in the library whipped towards them. 

“Janice,” Dawn hissed, “What are you doing?”

“OH THAT’S RICH! AS IF **YOU DON’T KNOW _EXACTLY_ WHAT YOU DID!** ”

Dawn looked down at her books, mentally planning how to get out of the library as quickly as possible. Janice had started picking fights with her in PE class a couple of years ago. Turns out, in order to end an altercation, teachers would send them to the office and never ask them to make up their running times. It only worked once a semester, too much drama and they’d start to notice it was a performance. It’s just that Janice had never used this technique _against_ her before, as a means to propel Dawn into an action she didn’t necessarily want to do. It wasn’t worth fighting. 

Dawn stood up with a great clash, her chair falling down behind her. “As if it’s any worse than what _you_ did!” she hissed, her hands busily putting away all of her things as orderly as she could without it appearing as though she was preparing to leave. 

Janice winked at her, “I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS! NEVER!!!”

Dawn’s chin started to wobble, she was always better at faking sadness and Janice always took lead on being the loud, angry one. Maybe that said something about the two of them, maybe it said nothing whatsoever. 

During their façade, Dawn’s eyes flickered between her busy hands and Janice’s loud protestations. She didn’t notice the dark circles under Janice’s eyes, or the slight wobble in her step. 

Janice was always the one that screamed into the void, when maybe it should have been the other way around. Maybe she was the one that needed to cry and sit still, to bury herself in pain instead of running from it. 

By the time they had been personally escorted out of the library, Dawn handed a tissue by a concerned security guard while Janice wailed and professed _promise we’ll always be friends!_ , Janice had her emotions under control once again. They were also sure to have a strong reconciliation at the end of any such show – Janice said that it gave the audience closure and made everyone feel better afterwards. Dawn took Janice at her word. 

Standing outside the library, Janice put her hands on her hips and grinned, “So. What do you want to do?”

They dropped Dawn’s books in her locker and walked to the mall, ate oversized pretzels and ice cream, and made up stories about the people they saw. Dawn grabbed a knick-knack here and there, Janice sometimes pointing out something that she particularly wanted. It felt normal, just like being a real girl. 

 

Spike’s crypt was always ten degrees too cold in the winter and thirty degrees too hot in the summer. Which is why she loved being there so much. And he stopped being surprised to see her long ago. 

_Long_ had such a strange sense of unbalance. She was an immortal Key from long ago, which probably made her few months of interrupting Spike’s life rather paltry and recent. On the other hand, she’d only really been alive for a handful of months in the grand scheme of things, so long felt pretty apt in that context. 

Sometimes she’d spend full afternoons there – when she probably should have been somewhere else – sitting in a patch of sunlight and thinking of absolutely nothing. She never took her research there, never thought about it, never let it cross her mind. It was private.

“SPIKE!!” she liked to enter while creating as much noise as possible. “Spike where are you?!”

He appeared from below with a shirt still in the act of being tossed over his head, “Stop that bloody racket, I’m here!”

“Spike I need to ask you an important question.”

He rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette, “I’m sure the universe waits on bated breath.”

“It might.”

“Just ask it already.”

“Who do _you_ think assassinated Kennedy?”

Spike stared at her, “Seriously?”

She sat down on the ground and picked at her sleeve, “No. You probably know the right answer and that takes all the fun out of it.” She drew a heart in the dirt on the step next to her. 

Spike swept the floor a bit with his boot and then sat down next to her, “Why so blue, Niblet?”

“Buffy hates it when you call me that.”

“Your big sis hates a lot of things about me.”

“Do you think she would have liked you when you were a ponce of a human?”

Spike took a long, hard look at her, “I wasn’t fit to kiss her shoe when I was a human.”

Dawn leaned her head on his shoulder.

They sat together for a while, not saying anything. Spike was always good for a round of stubborn silence. Or comforting silence. Or something. He was good for something. 

She felt like there was something she should be asking, something she should be saying, but she couldn’t wrap her head around what it was. She had wandered over as if by instinct.

“Spike?”

“Hm?”

“When’s the last time I came down here?”

“About a week ago.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t remember?”

Dawn sat up straight, running her hand through her hair in exasperation, “I don’t know.”

“You gave me a lecture on the perils of trusting ancient scribes to do their jobs correctly and then tore off.”

“ _Sounds_ like me.”

He looked over at her and then kicked her with his boot gently, “Now piss off. Its poker night and I can’t have you here where you might get eaten.”

“Save me a kitten, Spike,” she called on the way out the door. 

It was just about dusk outside and she walked home, not even noticing the chill. 

 

 

“So that’s the whole story. The … short version of the long version anyway.”

Sania sipped her espresso and raised her eyebrow, “If I didn’t know what I know I’d say you were full of shit.”

“If I didn’t know what I know I’d say the same thing. Sometimes it seems totally… not possible.”

“So these monks?”

“Never met them. Or… I don’t really get it. But Dawn – me Dawn – has never met them.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

“So the … the spell?”

“I wanted to see the original memory of something. From before the monks meddled.”

“And it worked?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Dawn shifted forward in her chair, leaning over the table. “Buffy’s memory matches what I saw, sort of… I mean, it’s more plausible in a way… but nothing matches what I remember.”

“So… wait what does that mean?”

“It means… there’s like three different versions.”

“Maybe your sister is just remembering it wrong? Maybe she doesn’t remember the details the way that you do.”

“But she’s so _sure_.”

“Hon, I’m sorry but why is this important?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Sania sighed. “Why does it matter what she remembers and what you remember? Everyone remembers things differently, monks or no monks. That’s just human.”

“Except Buffy and I aren’t exactly human.” Dawn picked up her salted caramel latte with raspberry sauce and took a large gulp. It was too hot. She’d have a burn on the back of her throat for days.

_Good._

“You want to know if something else is wrong?”

“What if I’m wandering around with this memory that … doesn’t _mean_ anything?” Dawn stiffened and fixed her gaze at a group of guys a couple years older than them at a table across the coffee shop. She heard the word _terrorist_ float through the air and then a huge burst of laughter when she looked over at them.

“Don’t listen, just focus.”

Dawn looked down at her coffee, face turning red, “I should give them a piece of my mind.”

“Let it go. Focus on our conversation?”

“Focus on my whining while those guys say—”

“I invited you out for coffee and I _wanted_ to talk to you about this. I really, really don’t want to talk about them.”

“What if they come over here?”

Sania shrugged and smiled, “So then they come over and I pretend not to speak English while you get the manager.”

Dawn grinned.

“Why does this matter, Dawn? What is it that’s really bothering you?”

“I just… I feel like I can’t trust my own mind. All these memories swirling around, making up me as I know myself and they aren’t real. What if everything I think is different? What if… what if I’m not who I think I am?”

“What if the world isn’t what you grew up to believe it is?”

Dawn slumped back, “I know. It’s ridiculous.”

Sania picked at Dawn’s bagel, “Those guys over there. They think they are right about me – about you. They’ve watched the news and they think they know. They think I really could be carrying a bomb in my skirt.” A sneer crossed Sania’s face, “They think my hijab makes me a terrorist instead of just a supportive sister and … dubiously devout Muslim. They have memories and facts and information swirling around in their head that’s wrong about me. That’s wrong about you. It’s shitty and it _sucks_ and most days I …” Sania paused, biting her lip. “You can’t change their minds.”

“Sania…”

“Are they any less real than you and me?”

Dawn fell silent. The group of guys stood up and walked out the shop. They didn’t pass any insults Sania’s way, their gazes full of curiosity and not a little prejudice. When the door shut behind them, some tension left Dawn’s shoulders.

“You’re still going to keep looking for answers, aren’t you?”

Dawn sipped her salted caramel latte.

 

 

Jeremy St. Clair has long fingers which his father always claimed would make him a champion quarterback and which his mother swore would make him a concert pianist, facts which they both still despair they could make true if they only pressure him in the _right_ way. Jeremy St. Clair has long fingers with stubby nails because he chews them down to the quick, a habit no one really notices unless they look at him very closely. Jeremy St. Clair has long fingers and right now they are tapping a directionless sort of beat on his leg as he pretends to listen to his friends trade insults and dirty jokes back and forth across the table in the little coffee shop he goes to in order to avoid conversations like these. He knows how to keep up, how to play the star quarterback for his dad, the concert pianist for his mom, a limited 17 year old bro for his friends. 

But all he really wants to do is watch that girl. 

Of course they notice. 

“She’s way out of your league, J.”

Antoine squints over his chair – that he’s sitting in it backwards, legs spread out and elbows on the back, “Hey isn’t that Buffy Summers’ little sister?”

Caleb, a skinny kid that Jeremy wishes he could like, but is actually one of those annoying sort of hangers-on that pretends to be a nice guy and will probably be singing that same song when he’s a twenty-three year old internet millionaire, bursts out, “Buffy? My cousin went to school with her, said she’s a real head case.”

Eli cuffs Caleb on the back of the head, “Shut up, idiot. Everyone knows who Buffy Summers is.”

Jeremy blinks at them, “Is this chick famous or something.”

Miguel steals the espresso from in front of him and takes a swallow, grimacing, “How do you drink this shit?”

“Seriously, what are you guys talking about?”

Caleb sniffs and leans back in his chair, “She’s nobody.”

“Abbie was in her graduating class, said Buffy single-handedly saved the whole town from a giant snake,” Dylan doesn’t look up from the sketchpad he has out in front of him. Jeremy’s never really understood why he is always with Miguel, Eli, and Antoine – probably a story that goes back to monkey bars or something like that. 

“A giant snake?” Jeremy looks back over at the girl. She uncrosses her legs and leans forward. Her friend laughs at her and she tosses her long brown hair over one shoulder. 

Eli shakes his head, “Bro I keep forgetting you just moved here.”

He kicks Dylan under the table, “You’re joking?”

Dylan fixes him with a steady gaze, his pencil poised in mid-air, “Giant. Snake. Look it up.”

“It was a joke. A practical joke,” Caleb crosses his arms over his chest. 

Antoine rests his chin on the back of his chair, “My cousin Leticia died. Her boyfriend was in Buffy’s graduating class. I see him sometimes, he won’t talk about it.”

“Terrorist attack? Crazy gun nuts? Tell me it’s something that isn’t a giant snake?” Jeremy feels a little queasy. 

“Believe it or don’t believe it. Just know that Buffy Summers is the most bad ass female in this one-Starbucks town,” Miguel says. 

Antoine has a haunted expression on his face, which is kinda weird, since he’s the most cheerful person Jeremy knows, he’s also the biggest linebacker Jeremy’s ever seen. He somehow makes even Eli and Miguel seem small, which is a fucking accomplishment. Rumor is he already has a scholarship lined up for Texas State next year. They’ll all be watching him in pro-games within the next few years. Which doesn’t mean he’s dumb. He’d probably rather go into Electrical Engineering like his sister. But a scholarship is a scholarship. 

“So… giant snake?”

“I heard she broke some guy’s nose on the swim team because he tried to ask her out,” Caleb says darkly. 

“My brother knew that asshole. He probably tried to feel her up or something,” Dylan is bored. He’s always bored. Especially if Caleb is talking.

Jeremy smiles over at Antoine, “Would you ask out Buffy Summers’ little sister?”

Antoine slides his gaze over to where the leggy brunette is sitting with her friend, “A bit too skinny for my taste.”

Miguel laughs, “I bet you ten bucks you don’t have the balls.”

Dylan is chewing on a smile, “How long have you been staring at her, anyway?”

Jeremy considers, “About a week.” It’s the biggest lie he’s ever told his friends and most of them will see through it in an instant. There are better coffee shops. Quieter ones. There’s even one with a fireplace a bit closer to his house. But about two months ago he was sitting at this very table and she came in, hair tucked up in a stupid knitted cap, with a pile of books that looked older than dirt. She got a cup of something with three extra shots and settled in for what became a four-hour study session. She looked like she was curing cancer or something over there with her half-a-dozen books and paper flying everywhere. Sometimes she wasn’t here when he came, but that was fine. It was a nice enough place. And he wasn’t stalking – not really… just enjoying the view. 

Eli sticks out his hand, “I’m on team-Jeremy. Ten bucks that he asks her out.” Two meaty hands meet in the middle of the table and shake. 

Dylan purses his lips, “But that’s not the interesting part.”

Antoine’s eyes glint with mischief, “Ten bucks says she turns him down.”

Miguel hoots with laughter and Jeremy catches the girl shooting them a dirty look. He blushes and it makes them all join in, even Dylan cracks a smile. 

“Ten bucks says she breaks his arm, or her sister does,” Eli puts in. 

“A hundred bucks she says yes,” Jeremy says, feeling rather bold. 

“So go do it,” Caleb says coldly. His interest is gone now that his opinion has been so wildly neglected. 

Eli pats Jeremy on the back, “Go get her, bro.”

Jeremy settles back in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him, “Not today. You’re all making asses of yourselves. I gotta play this my way.”

“Carry a copy of the _Bell Jar_ ,” Caleb sneers. “It’ll make you look sensitive.”

“I _am_ sensitive,” Jeremy’s face molds into false alarm. “Miguel thinks I’m sensitive, don’t you Miguel?”

Dylan is looking over at her, “She’s too smart for something that asinine anyway. If you try to lie to her even a little, she’ll probably break your arm.”

“Sure you’re sensitive, buddy. Cried watching _The Notebook_ and everything,” Miguel slings his beefy arm over Jeremy’s slight shoulders. 

Antoine looks up from his phone, “Who _doesn’t_ cry while watching _The Notebook_?”

“Oh you have got to be shitting me,” Caleb shifts in his chair uncomfortably. 

Eli grabs his arm, “Celeste made me watch that movie, man. It’s fucking amazing.”

“No—” Caleb has been around for long enough to know what’s coming next. 

Dylan smirks, “Ten bucks Caleb cries.” 

Antoine is already on his phone, “Hey babe. Caleb hasn’t seen _The Notebook_! … I know, I know… Trust me, _I know_ …”

Miguel squints down at his phone, “Gabby? … Wait, Victoria told you what? … Well of course we’ll remedy the situation…”

Eli hauls Caleb to his feet with one arm and puts his phone to his ear with the other, “Hey mom, is Celeste there? … already making popcorn? … yeah I’ll pick up _Papa Murphy’s_ on the way home,” he angles the speaker away from his mouth and turns to Jeremy, “bro, get three large pizzas on your way to my house.”

They tromp out the door, Caleb complaining loudly as they go, Dylan bringing up the rear with a snicker. Jeremy sneaks a glance at the girl on their way out, brushing her chair with his leg “accidentally” and is greeted with a look of pure, unfiltered malice. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have bet so much money on this. 

Good news is, if it works out he’ll be doing his best to piss her off whenever possible. She’s even hotter when she’s pissed off. 

 

 

Dawn was sitting in her favorite coffee shop, waiting for Sania with a stack of old tombs she snatched from the Magic Box. Three of them are going to need to be translated before they can make heads or tails of the bizarre narrative poetry – which is what the other two are there for. Honestly, Sania is just coming to keep her company and stop her from going insane.

Which, you know, she might already be. 

She was on her third cup of black coffee (with cinnamon) when she felt someone sit down in the chair across from her.

“Just a second, Sania,” she muttered into her pages, scribbling fiercely. “I’m almost done with this.” Translating an ancient demon text would be a hellava lot easier if the Watcher’s Council hadn’t had parts of it translated into Latin back during the Renaissance, and _badly_ it turned out. It looked like they had been using a previous translation in Akkadian as their guide for years, and some nitwit had translated that into Latin as his senior project, which gave her two conflicting texts in Latin. It took a lot of emails to get copies of the original sent to her, but now that it was here it turned out it was all an even bigger mess than she thought. Several passages in the Latin translation had no corresponding section in the original and vice versa, due to some fire or theft around the 600’s, if the scribe’s notes were anything to go on. It was a bit like running a three-legged race, with Akkadian and Latin versions all contradicting each other. She pulled out a post-it from her backpack and scrawled on it _NOTE: ALWAYS JUST GET THE ORIGINAL_ and then slapped it on the open page in her planner. There were several little notes like that sprinkled throughout. She liked post-its, made her feel like she could actually tackle the million or so projects that passed through her head at any given time. 

When she finally looked up, there was a boy with broad shoulders and sandy hair and light freckles sprinkled across his tan face and long fingers gripping the smallest cup of coffee she’d ever seen sitting in the chair that Sania _should_ have been in. 

“You aren’t Sania,” she blurted out. 

“Sania… that’s your friend, right? The girl who comes in here with you sometimes?”

Dawn’s eyes narrowed, which caused him to smile tiny crinkles appearing in the corner of his eyes, “What are you stalking me?”

“It’s hard not to notice you,” he took a sip of his drink and then it hit her. 

“You were in here the other day, with a bunch of your buddies.”

He sighed deeply, “My friends are idiots. I’m sorry if they bothered you.”

Dawn leaned back in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest, “What was so funny?”

“What?”

“That day, you were all looking over here and laughing. What was so funny?”

“They were just being assholes.”

“What. Was so. Funny,” her voice took on a hard edge and for some reason that made his smile widen. A fact that only made her more angry.

“They were daring me to come over and talk to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you are totally drop-dead hot and they could tell I was into you.”

Something clanged in her chest. That was one hundred percent not what she was expecting. He saw her defenses soften and charged forward.

“It’s hard not to… I mean, I’ve noticed you in here. I’ve been trying to work up the courage to talk to you for a … while…” he faltered. “Your sister isn’t going to kill me, is she?”

Dawn blinked, “My sister?”

“Caleb thinks she’s like a wack job or something but Antoine and Eli think she’s an FBI agent undercover and like… whatever…” he waved his hand as if to erase their words, “if I ask you out, what are the chances that I wind up dead in a ditch somewhere?”

“Pretty high, actually,” her voice came out strangled. 

“Like seventy percent, ninety percent, what are we talking here? I’m willing to go as high as eighty percent, but my mom really likes having me around and I’d hate to deprive her of my presence just for one date.”

“Mortality rates for teens in Sunnydale are already pretty high, so I mean your chances of survival don’t really go that far up or down just by asking me a question,” the corner of her mouth lifted slightly. 

His cheeks hurt from smiling so much, “So, I’ll pick you up around seven tomorrow?”

“You haven’t asked me yet,” she pointed out calmly.

“I’m worried the odds are stacked against me.”

“What … do you _think_ your odds are?”

His gaze skittered down to his hands for a second, picking at the fingernail on one thumb, before fixing his gaze back on her face, “Maybe, fifty-fifty?”

She whistled, “Mighty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“I’m quite a catch.”

“Really?” she laughed then, surprising herself. 

“Star quarterback, know my way around a piano, not too bad of a reader, great conversationalist, sexy,” he listed them off on his fingers. “I’m the full package.”

“Okay, full package. Sounds like you could have any girl you bat your boy band lashes at, what does that have to do with me?”

“You’re mysterious.”

Dawn rolled her eyes, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” She slaps a book closed and reaches for her messenger bag on the floor at her feet, “I’ll get more work done at the library.”

He reached out and grabbed her wrist, “Just… wait. I said that wrong.” She stared at his hand, fingers wrapped around her small bone. Maybe that cup of coffee in his hands wasn’t small. Maybe he just made everything look small by comparison. She eyed the cup warily, refusing to meet his gaze again. “You’re totally hot.”

“You said that,” at this point in the conversation, Janice would already have a promise ring or something. Hell, Janice would have dragged him off to the co-ed bathroom in the back and his pants would be around his ankles by now. 

“It’s not just that, it’s… what are those books?!”

“You want to go out with me because I like weird books?”

“Weird doesn’t cover it, these are. Are these _ancient_?” he pointed to an illuminated dragon on the corner of one page. “That looks like it belongs in a museum.”

“I got it at the Magic Box, it’s a shop in downtown. You can go there yourself at looks at all the books you want. Can you let go of my arm now?”

“It’s not the books!”

“Look, whole package. This is the first conversation we’ve ever had. What could you possibly know about me?”

“Isn’t that the whole point of a date, to get to know each other?”

“Generally people don’t start out cold turkey.”

“On blind dates they do.”

“I’m not a riddle for you to untangle, whole package.”

“So then tell me something, because all I know is that you love books, you always drink coffee with more sugar than caffeine, you could probably kill a man with your eyes under the right circumstances, and you hate shoes.”

Dawn blinked.

“Also your sister is scary as fuck and probably killed either a giant snake or some domestic terrorists, I can’t really figure it out. Neither really makes sense.”

Dawn thought back to the conversation that she thought she had heard a few days ago, about Sania. That they all were sitting around talking about her and her sister was either more embarrassing or less, but it was definitely nearly as infuriating. How many more demons did Buffy have to kill before the world woke up?

He was staring at her, she scrambled around for the perilous thread that would lead her back into the conversation. “I _love_ shoes,” she insisted lamely. 

“You kick them off the second you sit down and tuck your feet under you as soon as possible.”

“You really are a stalker, whole package.”

“My name is _Jeremy_ and you don’t have shoes on _right now_. Even if this was the first time seeing you, I could extrapolate from there.”

Dawn relaxed slightly, “So what do you want to know?”

Jeremy smiled, “Tell me three truths and one lie and see if I can guess which one is the lie?”

“My name is Joan, I am translating these books into English for _fun_ , I am fifteen but have only been alive for about a year, my best friend’s name is Janice, and your first guess doesn’t count.”

A barista that Dawn was on friendly terms with came over and topped up their cups with a smile, “I got a cheese Danish with your name on it, Dawnie. Should I heat it up?”

“That would be great, Zoe, thanks.”

“Your name is Dawn, you are freakishly good at translation, you had a religious experience last year,” he chuckled at her raised eyebrows, “and your best friend’s name is Janice.”

“You’re turn.”

“My name is Jeremy—“

“Doesn’t count, you already told me that.”

“I am an only child, I love sky-diving, I hate playing football, and even if you were the most boring person in the history of Sunnydale, I’d still want to take you out.”

“You have three older brothers.”

“Wrong.”

“Really?”

“I have _two_ older brothers and a younger sister, Emma.”

“What if I was the ugliest person in the history of Sunnydale?”

“I’d still want to take you out this Friday.”

“Why?”

“Three truths, one lie:: My favorite book is _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , I have ADHD, my mother _still_ thinks I might be a concert pianist someday, and I take my Chemistry notes in a Lisa Frank notebook my sister bought me for Christmas.”

“You take your notes in a standard notebook, just like any other jock.”

He winked at her and put a pink and purple notebook on the table in front of them, a unicorn smiled up at her, “My favorite book is _Where the Red Fern Grows_.”

“I found my sister’s Doogie Houser fanfic when I borrowed her laptop a few months ago, I have a standing date with her ex-girlfriend every other Saturday to eat junk food and pretend she’s still family, I hate pickles, and I haven’t seen my dad in at least three years.”

“Your sister never wrote Doogie Houser fanfic.”

“I _love_ pickles.”

“If you were a troll with a humped back I would still ask you out because the only time I feel calm is when I look up and can see you sitting across the room, I hate tomatoes, my sister’s goldfish is named Skywalker because she lost a bet to me, and I can speak fluent Italian.”

“Your meds work just fine and you are always calm.”

“I can’t speak a word of Italian. I am terrible at languages, I’ll never be able to help you,” he gestured at the books on the table between them.

Dawn takes a bite of her cheese Danish and chews it slowly.

“I’ve been in mortal peril more times in my life than you’d believe, I believe in dragons but not in unicorns, I have a cat named Miss Kitty Fantastico, and if you ask me out I’ll definitely turn you down.”

Jeremy leaned over, putting his elbows on the table with his arms still folded, “Please let me take you out this Friday?”

“Don’t make me regret this, whole package,” she tried to make her voice sound hard and sturdy, tried to channel Tara’s personal strength. 

“I won’t,” he looked like he wanted to lean forward or reach forward or something, but she flipped open her book and picked up her pencil, dismissing him.

“Meet you here at seven?”

“Make it five,” she looked up and up and up. _Damn, he’s tall._ “I have a really strict curfew. And Buffy is pretty scary.”

“What is it? Nine? Ten?”

“Sunset.” He gaped down at her and she smiled, “Which in May is around eight o’clock.”

“Always?”

“Well… if I’m with Spike, I can stay out later,” Dawn kept her voice measured. She liked dropping Spike’s name into conversation nonchalantly. Most people assumed he was her dog – she’d even had the guidance counselor inquire over Spike’s health in a way that definitely sounded like she thought he was a dog. There’s was very little chance that any of these people would ever discover the truth, but she held out hope.

“Do you ever sneak out?”

“Never,” and the expression she gave him was so guileless he had to believe it. 

Seconds after he walked out the door, a little bell announcing his departure, Sania and Naila plopped down at her table.

“I _knew_ he’d talk to you today, I just knew it!” Sania crowed happily. 

Dawn raised her eyebrows at her friend, “What are you talking about?”

“Please, Dawnie. He’s been watching you for weeks,” Naila wiggled two fingers at the barista behind the counter.

“But—”

“Don’t worry,” Sania pat her hand comfortingly, “sometimes you aren’t one hundred percent unobservant.” 

Naila giggled into her coffee cup, “Yeah. Sometimes you actually notice when we’re talking to you!”

“So the other day--?”

“They were talking about you. From what I gathered, there’s a few bets that you’d say no,” Sania’s eyes sparkled.

“Oh my god,” Dawn groaned and face-planted into her books. “Kill me now.”

Naila looked at her sister with a horrified expression, “What is she going to _wear_?!”

 

Janice took the news that Dawn had a date with Jeremy St. Clair with a kind of viciousness akin to Anya’s love for money, or … no, there was no other comparison. She apparently knew a lot about him from sitting next to his best friend, Dylan, in homeroom the past two years. Something about their last names being similar. 

“I don’t think he’s asked anyone out since Lindsey Morgan dumped him at the Spring Fling last year,” Janice chattered happily. 

“I thought Lindsey and Morgan were two different people?”

Janice shook her head. “Lindsey Morgan and Lindsey O’Neill are juniors and either rivals or best friends, kinda depends on the week,” her tone suggested that this kind of behavior was pedestrian, “Morgan Pace is a sophomore … Jesus Dawn do you not pay attention?”

Dawn stared at her friend, wide-eyed. 

“Apparently not,” Janice rolled her eyes and pulled a slinky red shirt off a rack and shoved it into Dawn’s arms. “Okay. Dressing room time.”

Dawn looked down at the pile of clothes Janice had piled on top of her like she was a pack mule, “There’s no way I’m wearing any of this.”

Janice ushered her into a dressing room, “Half the fun of a first date is the shopping beforehand.”

Once behind a curtain in her own dressing cubicle, Dawn glared down at her friend and plopped the clothes in her lap, “I thought the fun of dating was the dating.”

“Fifty percent: shopping. Thirty percent: getting dolled up. Ten percent: free dinner. Ten percent: the guy. If you go in thinking that the guy is going to Colin Firth his way through the date, you’ll just be disappointed in the morning.”

“Even the wondrous Jeremy St. Clair?” Dawn put the back of her hand to her forehead in a mock swoon.

“Guys are guys,” Janice shrugged. She pulled a black something that looked like lingerie out of the pile, her eyes glinting, “Try this one on first.”

In the end, Dawn whittled Janice down to a pair of skinny jeans and a new white linen top, with the promise that she’d wear a cute bra underneath and a pair of Buffy’s boots. On the way out the door, bags in hand, Dawn spotted a green cardigan on a discount rack. It was the color of a bright emerald and simple, no flourishes. Seventy percent off. She looked around and then pulled it off the hanger and put it into her bag with a smile.

It was the color of her dreams. It brought out the slight glint of green in her eyes. 

 

When she got home from her ‘date’ with Jeremy, Dawn closed the front door and leaned against it with a sigh, pulling her new sweater tighter around her waist. There were worse experiences, probably. Too bad she was a complete klutz and had no idea how to talk to anyone about something other than demons and ancient Sumerian texts about demon mythology. And no matter how lame or ridiculous her responses became, he still seemed genuinely _interested_ in everything she had to say. 

It was exhausting, that level of attention. 

Maybe it was better to be invisible.

She had about a half-dozen txts from Janice and Naila, wanting a minute-by-second playback of everything that happened and everything that was said. 

_It was fun._ she sent to Naila.

 _No, he didn’t feel me up._ she sent to Janice.

And then promptly turned off her phone. 

There was a pint of ice cream in the freezer that she had been saving for a particularly hard day. She really didn’t think that it would be necessary after a date – that from anyone else’s perspective probably went really well – but she also wasn’t really interested in saving it anymore, either. 

Buffy was at the kitchen island, looking at an old family photo album when Dawn walked in.

“You’re home early.”

“It’s almost nine. I’m nearly an hour past curfew. And shouldn’t you be out patrolling?” she didn’t mean to be harsh, but a pint of ice cream didn’t go very far with Buffy in the room. Slayer metabolism or something. 

“I was looking for something.”

“In the old album?”

Dawn looked toward the fridge and weighed her options. Buffy should be leaving to patrol any second, does she stand there awkwardly, or does she just get the ice cream out and let the chips fall where they may?

“There was this dress dad bought me once and I just wanted to find…”

Dawn shifted from foot to foot. She’d been too nervous to eat at the Chinese place Jeremy picked out. She could get away with eating ice cream for dinner, right? 

“What dress?”

Buffy blinked up at her, “I can’t remember. That’s why I’m looking. I really, really wanted it, but I think I only wore it like once before we moved to Sunnydale.” Dawn shook her head and went to the freezer, Buffy couldn’t eat _that_ much of her ice cream, surely. “It was red and had these really adorable purple flowers on it and I can’t remember why I wanted it so badly.”

Dawn pulled the ice cream out of the freezer, set it on the counter, pulled off the top with a pop! And then grabbed the chocolate syrup from the fridge and dumped it right on top, not even bothering with a bowl. She had a spoonful in her mouth before Buffy looked up.

“Chocolate syrup on sherbet? Seriously.”

“Mow oo won eaa in,” Dawn said through a mouthful of deliciousness. 

“Well that’s true.”

“You’re looking for a red dress with purple flowers on it? Are you sure it was a dress?”

“Yup.”

“It couldn’t be the sweater that you are wearing _right now_ that you’ve worn a half a million times so it’s not even red anymore and all the flowers have fallen off?”

Buffy looked down at her arm, stretched it out in front of her and smiled, “Hey! That’s right! It _was_ a sweater.”

Dawn looked down at the sherbet. She suddenly had a loss of appetite. “Why did you want that sweater so bad?”

Buffy shrugged, “I thought it was pretty.”

“It was kinda hideous at the time.”

Buffy considered her sister for a minute and then sighed, closing the photo album, “I found out that I was a Slayer like two weeks before he bought this for me, it seemed… I don’t know … like something that I could grow _old_ in. My Watcher kept telling me I was going to die, like any second, he didn’t have much faith in my ability to live.” She gave Dawn a watery smile, “And this – it was like something an old maid would wear. A middle-aged lady who worked in a library and had a dozen cats and loved _Dateline_.”

“But you don’t ever want to work in a library and have a dozen cats,” Dawn pointed out.

“I wanted the _choice_ , though.” Buffy looked down at her watch, “I gotta go patrol. Don’t stay up too late. And please eat something with nutritional value.”

“I will,” her voice echoed in the empty kitchen. 

 

 

“Where are all your old notebooks?” 

Janice had decided that a lack of play-by-play of the date from the previous night warranted her attacking Dawn with a pillow the next morning at an ungodly hour. An hour at which – if anyone had asked Dawn before – Janice didn’t know the right side of, at least not on a weekend anyway. 

“What?” Dawn looked down at Janice who was lying on her floor, looking up at her bookshelf with a little frown. 

“There used to be like ten or something notebooks in here, all _Harriet the Spy_ style.”

“You mean my journals? You read my journals?”

Janice propped herself up on her elbows and snorted, “Not the journals. The spy notebooks. They were my fucking jam.”

“I don’t … you’re talking about my _journals_.”

She rolled her eyes, “Whatever. I know what a ten year old’s journal looks like and that wasn’t this. They were like all these little stories and stuff about your neighborhood and your parents. Some really hilarious shit about the kids in your class.”

“I didn’t think that you knew what _Harriet the Spy_ is,” Dawn said dubiously, turning her attention back to painting her toenails purple. 

“I do read, Dawn Summers,” she sounded a little wounded. Dawn rolled her eyes, confident she couldn’t see. “I can see you! God you are a class-A bitch today, what the hell.”

“I burned them,” Dawn said, blowing on her toes.

“Before or after you cut yourself?”

“I can’t remember. It was all a blur.”

“Too bad, you probably could have published them someday. They were fucking hilarious, Summers.” Janice popped up, “Start a new one!”

“What?”

“Yeah, start a new one. Don’t write anything personal or like _poetry_ or shit like that. Write like you did before, about the people in class and in the neighborhood.”

“Why?”

Janice shrugged, lying back down on her back and lifting her feet in the air, twirling them a little, “To entertain me. I’m bored.”

Dawn laughed and threw a pillow at her. 

By Wednesday, she had a collection of Lisa Frank notebooks in her locker to choose from, all with a note on the first page from Janice that said NO EMO SHIT!.

 

 

She treated Tara to milkshakes and cheesy-jalapeno fries. 

Tara treated her to a movie with lots of explosions and terrible dialogue and guys running around without shirts on. 

“Is the cure still worse than the disease?”

Dawn wrinkled her nose, “Maybe there’s no one cure-all, maybe you keep finding new ones when the old ones don’t work anymore.”

That night she wrote about Tara’s mom in her notebook with the panda bears on the cover. Janice stole it from her in third period French class, causing a bit of a riot when she cried right there in front of everyone. After class – or more exactly, after Madame Belgard was sure Janice wasn’t about to go into the ladies to off herself – she thrust the notebook back in Dawn’s hands.

“Write about my parents.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what you get right.”

 

 

“What are you writing, Niblet?”

“Nothing. Everything. What do you want me to write?”

“Something for posterity?”

“How about something _true_?”

“I only tell the truth, love.”

The story she wrote down was vastly different than the words he spoke aloud to the cold cemetery air. The story she read back to him made him laugh and throw her up in the air as if she was a child of three or four and not a fifteen year old girl with limbs too long for her body and a heart that weighed like a stone in her chest. Vampires were good to keep around – they made one feel so much younger and smaller than they really were. 

 

She wrote down the stories of the sweater and gave it to Sania. 

“You are terrible at this,” she said helpfully over a cup of coffee while they ignored Jeremy and Dylan sulking in the opposite corner by the window. 

“At writing?”

“At telling your own story.”

“It’s not _my_ story – it’s the sweater’s story.”

“Really?” Sania looked down at the page. “All I see is you.”

Dawn pulled out the notebook with a unicorn on it that Elizabeth – Jeremy’s charming little sister – had given her with a slightly sticky grin, “Here, read this one about Jeremy’s aunt Beatrice. I met her over the weekend and she’s a laugh riot.”

Sania studied the page. After a few minutes she giggled, “Okay. You _are_ good. But … it’s weird.”

“What?”

“I feel like I learned more about you than about dear old aunt Beatrice.”

Dawn looked down at the notebook on the table in front of her. She was writing about the time Tara’s family came in to town. It was a hard memory, but it felt important. “Isn’t that what writing is, exposing the author?” Sania gave her a _look_ and Dawn shrunk back into her seat. “You disapprove.”

“No. I’m thinking.”

“About my genius?”

“About mine.”

Dawn smiled, “Did you just find the answer to world peace in your brain?”

“Let me take this home. I want to write the story of the sweater and see what happens. I want to see what I get wrong.”

 

 

“Hey! There’s a party this weekend, come with me?” Jeremy sat on the table next to Dawn with a sudden _plunk_ all excitement and twinkling eyes. 

“Jer, you scared the crap out of me,” Dawn brushed at her jeans where she had just spilled her coffee. 

“Oh, hey. Sorry. I said your name like three times.”

Dawn sighed, that was probably true. She was actually really enjoying the latest unit in her English class and had asked Ms Kaloyan for some extra reading (Celeste had twinkled a bit, but thankfully didn’t say a word) and had a way of completely disappearing into whatever she was reading. “What’s up, Jer?”

“Party. You and me. Saturday. You game?”

Dawn looked up at him. He was pretty. And funny. And she actually had a good time hanging out with him, to her surprise. She’d even got in the habit of coming over to help him babysit his sister on Fridays. But it didn’t feel magical or heartbreaking or anything. She’d be the first person to admit that she did _not_ want to follow in her sister’s footsteps, nothing soul-crushing. She wanted a steady, simple boyfriend. In the event that she ever _wanted_ a boyfriend. Which, unfortunately for Jeremy, wasn’t what she wanted at the present moment. And it didn’t seem fair to keep dating him when she didn’t want what he wanted. She’d bumped into him talking to some of his friends once, Miguel and his girlfriend Gabby. There was something about Jeremy’s face, looking at them, something wistful. He wanted that, couplehood thing. Where you bicker over what movie to watch on Fridays and eat each other’s French fries. 

“Jeremy… I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she tried to put everything in her face so that she wouldn’t have to say the words aloud. 

He grinned down at her, “It’s just some friends getting together. You’re allowed to have friends, right?”

“… right,” she smiled hesitantly. 

“Get away from my student, St. Clair. You know I can take you in a fight,” Celeste’s cheerful voice came from behind them. 

“Hey!” Jeremy leaped off the desk and swooped Celeste in a hug, “Convince Dawn here to come to your party.”

“What party?” Celeste brushed him off with a smile and walked around to her seat across from Dawn.

Jeremy stood behind Dawn’s chair, putting his hands on her shoulders, “The one at your house that Eli is hosting.”

“That’s not a party exactly.”

Jeremy looked at his watch, “I’ll be late for practice. Do whatever you can to get this girl to come out.” And then he was gone. 

Celeste fought back a smile, “So you and Jeremy?”

Dawn groaned and slumped back in her chair, “Is he always like a newborn puppy on caffeine?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Celeste eyed her, “Look, you don’t have to come as his date. But you should come.”

“I should?”

“Definitely,” Celeste took out her editing like the matter was already settled. “You can meet Eli and everyone. And I promise Jeremy will be on his best behavior.”

A few minutes later, Dawn said softly, “He just… deserves a _girlfriend_. Someone better.”

Celeste smacked her hand with a ruler, “Shut up. You’re way out of St. Claire’s league. No one could do better than you.”

“That’s just what girls say to each other. I know about Girl Code, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m not the right girl for him.”

Celeste wiggled her eyebrows, “You know who _is_ the right girl for him?” Dawn shook her head, so Celeste leaned forward and whispered, “AudreyDebois. She’s had a crush on him for years. I’ll invite her and she’ll distract him for you.”

“So I’m not going to get out of this, is what you’re saying?”

Celeste grinned, “Nope.”

 

 

She was sitting in the living room just beginning to read the loose pages Sania had tucked into her History textbook earlier that day, when Buffy walked through the front door and collapsed on the couch beside her. 

“Studying?”

“Not… really. Just reading something Sania wrote for me.”

“Like a poem?”

“More like… a short story.”

“Sania is the disgustingly beautiful one with a twin sister, right? Their mom thinks we’re starving and is always sending over food?”

“Pretty sure their mom thinks everyone needs her to cook for them, she’s just that type.”

“Mom wasn’t really that type,” Buffy’s eyes closed. “I liked that about her.”

“Me too.”

“Can you read it to me?”

“Read you Sania’s story?”

“Yeah… unless you think I won’t like it?” Buffy’s eyes stayed closed. 

Dawn looked down at the page in her hand, BEING THREE STORIES OF A SWEATER. She cleared her throat and began,

_Being Three Stories of a … Clock_  
The first time, the clock was loved. So loved and so desired that a little girl begged for hours just to look at it. She ~~wore~~ **took** it with her on all her grand adventures. It grew old and worn, but was still loved.  
The second time, the clock was a consolation prize. Brought home by a father too tired to care, unseen by the girl, and mocked by the wife. In this story, it was nothing more than a trinket.  
The third time, the clock was loved by another – purchased on a whim and given away. It was always meant to be a gift and never for herself. She begged for the sake of another and it was loved well enough. It was a token.  
Selfish love, tired love, selfless love.  
And now it is up to you, which is the truth? Which story will stand the tests of time? What truth will the teller choose – that of the coveted, that of the abandoned, or that of the gift? 

Dawn looked up and saw Buffy wiping away tears.

“Buffy? Everything okay?”

“You know, we never really talked about … you. Like, the Key-you or whatever. It all happened so fast, you weren’t there and then you were and… I’m sorry.”

“What made you think of that?”

Buffy stood up and stretched, “I can get Giles and the gang in research mode if you want.”

“What I want, Buffy Anne Summers, is for you to tell me what – no, I can do my own… that is… no research necessary.”

“The story made me think of you. Or the Key. Glory wanted you so bad, she killed so many people. And the monks kinda just dropped you off without a manual or anything.”

Dawn swallowed, “So I’m a clock now?”

“Better than me. I’m just a Chosen One. And _death is my gift_ , right?”

Tears stung Dawn’s eyes, she laughed hollowly, “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

Buffy was already halfway up the stairs, “Don’t stay up too late.”

“Of course not,” her voice echoed through the house, soft and low. 

“AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH BEFORE YOU GO TO BED!” Buffy shouted from her room. 

Dawn looked up and smiled, “YEAH OKAY, GOT IT!”

 

 

Dawn dragged Janice to Celeste’s party and lost her promptly within five minutes. She spent most of the party sitting in a corner talking to a guy with glasses and jet-black hair and black polish on his nails. 

“I’ve never seen Dylan like that,” Jeremy said, leaning down to whisper in her ear.

“What?”

“You successfully brought the only girl in the world that could make Dylan comfortable at one of these things,” he gestured to where Janice was sitting. “He’s like the definition of anti-social.”

Dawn shook her head, “I’ve never seen Janice like that, either.”

“Really?” Jeremy’s forehead wrinkled. “I’ve seen her a lot in the art studio with Dylan after school and stuff. I didn’t even know she existed outside of the art lab.” 

“Art lab?” Dawn didn’t have the words necessary to respond to that. She tugged on the sleeves of her green sweater and watched her friend. Janice had none of the usual guile and practiced air that usually oozed out of her like an extra limb. It was disjointing. 

“Yeah, Dylan’s a real geek about art. Carries his sketchpad around with him everywhere, but he always says he has nothing on Janice.”

“Nothing on Janice,” Dawn echoed. 

“Hey, come check this out,” he steered her towards an empty hallway. “I always get a kick out of looking at these old photos of Celeste and Eli when they were kids.”

Dawn blinked up at a wall of family photos, with Eli and Celeste beaming out of them.

“Their parents were on the waitlist to adopt Celeste when they found out Eli was on the way… or at least that’s what they’ve told me. That’s why they don’t look anything alike,” Jeremy pointed at a picture of Celeste as a baby, her eyes wide a look of confusion on her face.

“They’re siblings?” Dawn whispered.

But Jeremy didn’t hear her, he was already calling out to someone across the room, “Hey! Lori! Get your ass over here!”

A short girl with broad shoulders, an eyebrow piercing, and a pixie-cut came barreling over, pinning Jeremy in a huge hug, “Hey kid. You seen my girlfriend around anywhere?”

“Celeste? Yeah, I saw her in the kitchen with Audrey. I’ll escort you myself,” he fell into a ridiculous bow and held out his arm like an 18TH century painting, leaving Dawn alone in the hallway. 

She dashed into the nearest bathroom and locked the door. Her reflection stared back at her, wide-eyed and a little mussed. Janice had insisted on curling her hair for the party and while it had fallen in perfect ringlets around her face an hour ago, now she looked like she had gone on a long ride on the back of a motorcycle.

She put a hand on either side of the sink and glared at herself in the mirror, “You, Dawn Summers, are the most _oblivious_ person on the planet.”

And then she laughed. Laughed so hard she cried, wiping at her mascara with scraps of toilet paper. When she finished, she ruffled a hand through her hair, blew her reflection a kiss, and walked out the door. 

Somehow Eli had lured Janice away from Dylan into the kitchen, and Jeremy was flirting with some girl Dawn presumed was Audrey in the dining room. Everyone had broken off into little clumps, Celeste playing queen of the hour with her arm around Lori’s waist. Dawn sat down next to Dylan and watched him sketch Antoine and Miguel playing video games on the floor. 

Eventually Celeste pulled her off the couch and started dragging her around the house until she felt comfortable enough to mingle on her own. And she did. It wasn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be. 

“They’re really nice,” she said to Spike as he walked her home. 

He ruffled her hair with his hand, “Well if they aren’t, you let me know and I’ll eat them.”

“You couldn’t.”

“No,” he said soberly. “But I’d really want to.”

 

 

“So what did I get wrong?” Sania said over coffee, watching Dylan, Eli, and Jeremy tease Caleb from under hooded, judgmental eyes. 

“Nothing. You didn’t get anything wrong.”

“Get what wrong?” Naila smiled down at them, shoving Eli over so she could sit down with them.

“On the quiz today. I got all the answers right,” Sania said quickly. 

“Great! Hey how do you guys feel about a movie this weekend?” Naila put her question to the group.

“Something without explosions, _please_ ,” Janice groaned as she lowered herself into the small space between Dylan and Caleb. 

“But that’s Dawn’s favorite,” Jeremy teased, slinging his arm around her shoulders and pinching her cheek playfully. 

Janice handed Dawn the notebook with her parents inside of it, “You got it all right, by the way.”

“Maybe I was wrong,” Sania said later when they were standing in line waiting for popcorn. “Maybe writing isn’t about exposing the author.”

“Maybe you were right,” Dawn said, cocking her head to the side. “I couldn’t see it really, until you pointed it out.”

“No… you saw it when Buffy pointed it out.”

“So then?”

“So maybe writing is about the reader.”

Dawn took Sania’s arm and laughed, “Maybe that’s too philosophical for a Saturday night out at the movies.”

“It’s Friday.”

“You know what I mean.”

Celeste walked up when they were both still giggling, Dawn’s face hidden in Sania’s shoulder. “What’s the joke?”

 

 

She came home from her morning run with Celeste and Victoria covered in sweat and panting. She eased open the front door and closed it softly behind her, not wanting to wake anyone up. Willow, since swearing off magic, had developed super-sonic hearing, waking at the slightest noise. She considered the hallway leading to the kitchen and the stairs, each had their own merits. In the kitchen there was water and food, but upstairs was the shower. 

Not for the first time in her life, she lamented her parent’s decision to live in Southern California. It shouldn’t be so hot at six in the morning in the middle of March. With a sigh, she trudged (quietly) up to where… all the bedroom doors were open. She stood for a moment at the head of the stairs before tip-toeing up to Buffy’s bedroom. It was empty. So was Willow’s room. 

_Weird_. 

She shrugged, _probably a Scooby thing_ , kicked off her shoes and grabbed her towel from her room, and opened the door to the bathroom, flicking on the light. For a terrible moment she imagined that maybe she’d find Willow, high on magic in the bathtub. Or a weird seduction scene with candles and incense. But the bathroom was empty. Or at least, there was no one lurking inside. 

Three women sharing a bathroom hadn’t been that much of a challenge when she was younger and their mother was alive. But between her hair products, Willow’s stringent skin routine, and Buffy’s obsession with sweet-smelling lotions, it always seemed like a hurricane had ripped through the bathroom. Also, Buffy was a first-class slob and rarely a week went by without someone stepping out of the shower right onto a shirt infested with demonic goop. 

She reached into the shower and turned the handle for hot water all the way to the right, jiggled the cold to the left a bit, and then slung the curtain shut so that none of the water would escape. She peeled off her tank top, grimacing at the way it stuck to her wet skin, and then walked over to deposit it in the… overflowing hamper. Apparently she was going to be doing laundry today. In seconds, her sweat-soaked sports bra, shorts, panties, and socks joined the shirt in the hamper and she scampered over to the shower, pulling her hair out of its ponytail as she went. 

The water was scalding hot; she let it wash over her sore muscles with a sigh. Even in the dead of summer, when the highs could get up into the hundreds, she still preferred hot showers. She picked up the shampoo that Janice and Sania had convinced her to buy and rubbed it into her scalp. It smelled spicy, like cardamom and cinnamon. She closed her eyes and inhaled, maybe later she’d write a story about a pirate, smuggling spices across high seas. In her mind, a ship danced through waves as lightning storms threatened to tear it apart, a woman with a scar across her face and long hair whipped about by the wind clung to the edge and laughed. She stepped more fully into the water, letting the shampoo rinse through her hair slowly. The last time she’d submitted a fantasy story like that to the newspaper, Dinah had wrinkled her brow and suggested that maybe she should stick to more contemporary settings. Celeste had pushed it through the presses, though, with an accompanying illustration by Dylan and Janice. She picked up the matching conditioner with blind hands, uncapping the lid and smelling first to make sure it was the right bottle. Once, she had accidentally mixed her spicy shampoo with Willow’s lavender conditioner. It wasn’t a pleasant affect. Spice, haunting and teasing, greeted her. She put a small dollop into her palm, rubbed it through her fingers, and then pulled her long hair over one shoulder, carefully spreading the thick substance through her ends. 

Careful to keep her hair out of the stream of water, she turned and held her face up, first rinsing off her hands and then rubbing her face, slowly opening her eyes. There was a slight tingle of worry lingering at the back of her mind, it wasn’t like the Scoobies to call a meeting so early in the day… but on the other hand, it meant she had the bathroom all to herself and could take as long of a shower as she wanted. Usually by the time she’d applied her conditioner, someone was knocking on the door, demanding entrance. She stretched her arms out into the water, it felt good to just _relax_ in the heat for a moment. 

She ladled some liquid soap onto her loofah, daydreaming more than paying strict attention to her hands, just enjoying the sound of the water hitting the floor, a faint hum of birds chirping outside the open window. She picked up her razor and glared at it; hers was green, Buffy’s was pink, Willow’s purple. It was a Saturday, she had no plans for the evening, and hopefully nothing that would require a skirt would pop up on Sunday. She put the razor and waved to it playfully, wiggling her fingers. Of course, now that she had chosen _not_ to shave her legs, the likelihood of Janice or Celeste or Lily springing a surprise girl’s night out nearly tripled. The last time she had settled in for a nice, relaxing weekend of laundry and a _Felicity_ marathon, Gabby had appeared at her back door, armed with tickets to Six Flags and a gleeful promise to buy her all the cotton candy she wanted. (She was a sucker for cotton candy.) And so, with Miguel and Caleb in tow, they’d gone to the amusement park armed with sunscreen and she’d left her solitary weekend behind her like so much leftover Thai food. _Ooh_ , she straightened. There was leftover Thai food in the fridge right now. 

Hurriedly, she rinsed out the conditioner, opted to leave shaving for another day, and finished her shower. Just before getting out, she turned the cold handle all the way to the right and the hot all the way to the left; and stood in the ice-cold water for as long as she could, turning this way and that so that every part of her body cooled down, before turning the water off and hopping out into the steamy bathroom. As fast as she could, she gathered under her armpits and dashed to her room, trying to hold onto the cooling effect of the water as long as she could. 

Once in her room, she toweled off quickly, brushed her hair and pulled it into a bun at the top of her head, and slipped into her oldest pair of jeans – the ones with the grass stains on the knee from that time she’d let Antoine convince her to play on his co-ed softball team – and a UC Sunnydale shirt left over from the Riley days. She rolled up her towel in a ball and looked around her room. There were some papers on her desk – left over projects for the newspaper piled on top of Scooby research piled on top of her Key research – and a pile of clothes in the corner that Victoria had brought over for her and Janice to sort through. She straightened the comforter on her bed and arranged the pillows a bit so that it looked a bit neater. _Good enough_.

Dawn threw her towel on the floor of the bathroom on her way to Buffy’s room. She walked in just enough to pull the door closed slightly and grab the towels off of their hooks. She threw them into the bathroom on her way to Willow’s room and did the same. Once that was done, she gathered up the hand towels and threw them on the pile. She peeked her head into the shower to make sure there weren’t any misplaced washcloths lingering, then gathered everything up in her arms and skipped down the stairs to the basement. She set the towels on the floor in front of the washing machine, leaned over and adjusted the settings to **HOT-COLD** and then twisted the start button to **HEAVY WASH**. As the water ran into the machine, she measured out the liquid detergent and poured it clockwise into the water, then she grabbed the liquid bleach and poured in just one count of _Mississippi_ worth. While the water ran, she jumped up the stairs to gather up the towels in the kitchen, returning to throw them in the machine, along with the towels from upstairs, and then closed the lid on the machine with a satisfied smile. It was highly likely that without her in the house, Willow and Buffy would use the same bath towel forever without washing it. 

She climbed the stairs, admiring her toenail polish as she walked. Janice had painted them a pretty pale pink and added little green flowers on the big toe. Unfortunately, she thought as she lugged the bathroom hamper down the stairs, Janice's art skills far outstripped her own. She had ended up just doing blue and purple stripes for her friend. She left the bathroom hamper in the basement and started the long climb back up to the bedrooms. Of course, she did a significantly better job than any of the boys could probably manage - with Dylan as the dubious exception. She tried to imagine Eli trying to paint Janice’s fingernails with the same deft attention to detail his girlfriend had and started chuckling to herself. She picked up the hamper in Will’s room and looked around the room. Rules were, anything _not_ in the hamper wasn’t going to be cleaned. Which generally meant Buffy had to do her own. She looked down at the one pair of jeans and two t-shirts in Will’s hamper and shrugged, maybe she did a load in the middle of the week. She carried Willow’s basket into Buffy’s room and emptied it into Buffy’s overflowing hamper. After returning Willow’s basket back to her room, she sighed and picked up her sister’s laundry. A few weeks ago, this much lifting, carrying, and climbing would have worn her out, but thanks to Celeste (and Victoria to a certain extent) taking a personal interest in forcing pain upon her in the form of friendship, she was in much better shape. She couldn’t kick Buffy’s ass yet or anything but… the sudden image of her flying off the stairs to tackle her sister made her smile. It was worth a try. She’d at least have the element of surprise. 

In the basement, she emptied all the baskets into one pile at her feet and then began sorting. Darks with darks, lights with lights, delicates with delicates, crummy-demon-goo-adorned-jeans with blood-and-dust-covered-trackpants. At the bottom of the pile was a pair of red plaid pajama pants that Janice had left at the house months ago. She remembered the first time Janice had ever spent the night at the Summers’ home, her mom had made them homemade lasagna and Italian sodas and they watched some old movie about Audrey Hepburn going on adventures with Gregory Peck in Rome. She smiled at the memory and made her way up the stairs, taking a quick look at the clock perched on top of a bunch of boxes to note the time.

On her way up the stairs to the kitchen, her stomach gave a low gurgle of protest. “Okay buddy,” she said aloud, patting her stomach. “I know just what to do.”

The kitchen was… moderately clean. It wasn’t like they were in the habit of making big family dinners anymore, which really toned down the mess. On the counter was a slip of paper, she picked it up with every intention of putting in the trash, when she noticed her sister’s handwriting. _PICKED UP AN EXTRA SHIFT. WILL AT SCHOOL. SEE YOU FOR DINNER. ♥ B ___She crumpled up the paper, an announcement for a new movie rental store on the back, and threw it in the trash, smiling. Willow’s forays into the halls of UC Sunnydale tended to last _hours_. 

Which meant: chocolate peanut butter banana pancakes. 

She pulled out the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, milk, chocolate chips, extra crunchy peanut butter, eggs, oil, and vanilla extract and laid everything on the kitchen island. She was a talk show host, she was one of those early morning cooking show hostesses, she needed music. The old cassette player was still perched on the window over the sink, she pressed PLAY and the kitchen was full of the rhythmic sounds of salsa music. As far as she knew, her mother never learned the salsa - in fact, she had little to no inner rhythm or dancing ability - but she _loved_ salsa music in the kitchen. Must have been something about the trumpet, since their mother was also partial to jazz. She liked to think that their mother had had a desperately beautiful love affair with a young trumpet player in college before meeting their father. She imagined him tall and tan, with sparkling black eyes and maybe even a ridiculous mustache. She closed her eyes and wiggled her shoulders a little, adding a little sashay of her hips. She was a brilliant, desired salsa dancer - renowned throughout the world for her love affairs. She opened her eyes and laughed, twirling back over to the kitchen island and her pancakes. 

She imagined someone walking in right at that moment, when she was laughing and spinning alone in the kitchen. If it was Spike, he’d probably just lean back and smirk over at her. God forbid… she really didn’t want to imagine Spike dancing the salsa! Buffy would laugh and lean against the counter, a certain sadness in her eyes, both of them remembering their mother. Willow would laugh and disappear upstairs, she came from a family where kitchen dancing was a strictly private affair. Celeste would join in, immediately giving proper salsa dancing pointers. Janice would somehow know to have a camera ready, she’s always prepared for good blackmail material. 

She danced over to the cupboard with the mixing bowls and pulled out the one she always used for pancakes, it was a white and orange ceramic monstrosity with a large chip on the edge. There was no particular reason why she always used it for pancakes, except for that she did. She shimmied back to the island, humming along with the music a bit. She set the bowl on the counter and pushed up the sleeves of _her green sweater_. She dumped the milk, peanut butter, egg, oil, chocolate chips, and vanilla extract into the bowl. She grabbed a banana out of the bunch in the fruit bowl and peeled it, throwing the peel into the trash across the room. Her aim was getting better, she noticed with satisfaction. Not that she’d ever admit to Antoine that his coaching was paying off. With one hand, she took out a butter knife and began cutting off small chunks to fall into the bowl. After a moment, she decided to add a second banana - you can never have too much banana - and did the same.

She mixed everything together with a fork, her hips swaying back and forth to the music the whole time. She added the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and stirred until it was all smooth. She dipped a finger into the bowl and licked the batter off of her finger. “More chocolate,” she said to herself. She was a tyrant, a queen demanding only the most perfect pancakes from her lowly servants! Celeste would never let her publish a story about a dominatrix queen hassling her serfs, but she might just write it anyway. Just to see the look on Celeste’s face. She pulled cocoa powder out of the cupboard and shook it indiscriminately over the batter a few times. She put the lid back on the container and stirred the powder in, careful to move slowly so that the cocoa wouldn’t fly everywhere. After another taste-test, it was ready. 

She moved to the stovetop and looked at the clock. “Ah hell,” she whispered to herself before flying down the stairs to the basement. After pulling the heavy, wet towels out of the washer and putting them in the dryer, she turned and glared down at the piles of laundry waiting to be washed. “Who is first?” she asked them, hands on her waist. She really wished that magic was like in the movies – or like in _Bewitched_ \- and all the household chores could just be done without any human effort being involved. Not that they could really do magical laundry with Willow on the wagon, but it was a pleasant thought anyway. 

She decided on the delicates, since most of them would have to hang-dry. That way, everything would be finished around the same time. She adjusted the temperature on the machine and this time added fabric softener instead of bleach to the water before putting the clothes in. When that was finished, she brushed her hands together and congratulated herself on a job well done. Even if she walked upstairs now to find someone in the kitchen eating her well-deserved pancakes, she’d been more productive before eight o’clock on a Saturday than most people. Maybe she’d take a nap later in the day, when the sun was just cresting over into its decent and everything was warm and soft. She could take a cup of iced coffee into the backyard with the novel Gabby had lent her but she hadn’t had a chance to read yet, and fall asleep in the shade. That sounded like a perfect way to end the day. 

She skipped up the stairs and returned to her pancakes. 

She placed the skillet on the burner and lit it carefully, turning the dial down so that it wasn’t too hot. She grabbed the 1/4 cup and the orange bowl of batter and the butter and brought them over to the skillet. After melting a healthy helping of butter on the pan, she ladled out three perfectly round pancakes. As bubbles began to appear on the surface, she popped them with the edge of her spatula, nodding along to the music. The first pancake flipped himself in half instead of completely over and she scolded him loudly for it, her swearing echoing through the empty house. The second pancake tried to escape, one side angling up on the side of the pan, but she just pushed it back into position carefully. The third pancake flipped over perfectly and then slid a bit to the left so that it was a little uneven. She thought back to the funny shapes Tara was able to make during the summer when Buffy wasn’t and shook her head. She was too clumsy for something like that. 

As the pancakes cooked on the other side, she got out a plate and the blackberry jam from out of the fridge. The first pancake, half-flipped-Fred, she ate with her hands, rolled up and eyes closed. He was still a little gooey in places from not having been properly flipped. He was delicious. She told him so. The second pancake she spread with extra butter and ate like a sandwich, taking little bites out of it’s flat circular self. He was gone too quickly to get a name. The third she placed on the plate, slathered in butter and jam, and then told him to wait as she ladled out three more pancakes into the skillet. 

She got a fork and cut into the third pancake, Albert, portioning off a perfect bite before stabbing it with the fork and bringing it to her lips. He was perfect. She ate him over the stove, watching the others cook. They all flipped correctly and were put on Albert’s empty plate in a neat stack. She dolloped a bit more butter in the pan for the last, oversized pancake, and then spooned the rest of the batter into the pan. She wondered for a moment why anyone would eat pancakes _without_ chocolate chips in them, then promptly decided such individuals were not worth her investigative skills. 

When the last pancake was done, she turned off the gas and took her stack of pancakes - fully buttered and dripping with blackberry jam - to the living room and watched Saturday morning cartoons. She wondered if Jeremy and Elizabeth were watching the same ones, and then remembered that they were on a family trip to Los Angeles for the weekend. She made a mental note to see if Janice still wanted to go bikini shopping in a few weeks. Maybe Janice could convince her mother to take them into LA for the purpose. 

Pancakes finished, she went back to the kitchen and rinsed off all the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. She wiped off the counters and turned the salsa music up a bit louder so she could hear it downstairs. Down in the basement, she folded the fluffy, hot towels and hung up the delicates before starting the darks load. She nearly fell down the stairs taking them too fast going back up and scolded herself sternly. Feeling motivated, she proceeded to vacuum the living room, foyer, and dining room. A few times she got a bit tangled up in the cord, dancing and vacuuming at the same time proved to be a bit of a stretch for her. In the end, she angrily put the vacuum in time-out instead of attempting the stairs. Then, she organized the mail that had accumulated on the dining room table.

By the time the load of goop-and-blood clothes were in the wash, the entire house was clean. Well, the downstairs. Also, she was tired of salsa music. Coming up from the basement, Dawn shut off the music and went upstairs to change. She felt a little sweaty from all the cleaning. It was a dirty sport. She stripped out of her dirty clothes, put _her green sweater_ on the foot of the bed, and changed into a cute pink tank top and shorts. Armed with her borrowed book, sunglasses, a beach towel, a peanut-butter-and-salami sandwich, iced coffee, and tanning oil, she went out into the backyard and settled back to enjoy the rest of her day. 

By the time the sun had slipped down below the horizon, she had fallen asleep, sprawled across her towel carelessly.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: I just wanted to add a note about the sweater. In the writing of this, the sweater represented many things for me as an author, and for the girls. For Dawn, the sweater is a symbol of her mourning, her depression, and her autonomy. Ending the story with her in her *own sweater*, but not dependent upon it, was very important. Above all, this is a story of Dawn as an author, and how she IS capable of writing and living her own life, despite what the monks did in order to make her. 
> 
> For Buffy, the sweater - and her perspective of it - is symbolic of her feelings towards living and life. In the beginning, she remembers the sweater as something that Dawn wanted for her, but towards the end of this story, she remembers the sweater as something to grow old in. This was the easiest way for me to show that while Dawn is stuck in her own head, Buffy is also coming to terms with her own depression and new life.


End file.
